May 15, 2006	Monday	Rabi-us-Sani 16, 1427

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LAHORE, May 14: Cotton sowing in the southern Punjab is facing multiple problems and is still stuck to around eight per cent mark even in mid-May, said farmer bodies here on Sunday.

“The ideal sowing time, which is the month of May for the core cotton areas, is running out but the farmers still have no water to plant their crop. Non-perennial canals mainly feeding the core cotton areas started running on May 5 instead of April 15, causing a loss of 20 crucial days,” they said.

Water still had not arrived in the entire area and canals were running at a level much lower than the required. The other option, they said, was of tubewells but the rural areas were having a 10-hour daily loadshedding on an average that made it impossible for them to pump water.

As for the diesel, which energised almost 70 per cent of the tubewells, they said it had simply spun out of a common farmer’s range.

“Cotton sowing has not gone beyond eight per cent because of the water crisis,” said Farooq Bajwa of the Farmers Associate Pakistan. During the last two weeks, weather had been dry which was ideal for cotton sowing but water unavailability was taking a toll on the farmers, he said.

As if it was not enough, he said, the farmers had worries in their minds with the forecast of rain and winds in the next few days. “When it rains immediately after sowing, crust formation takes place in soil surface and the farmers have to re-sow the crop. So another round of psychological crisis will grip them now. Time is of crucial importance for any crop and it has been and is being lost for cotton,” he said.

He said the authorities concerned should bear in mind that the 11 districts of southern Punjab, which formed the core area, produced over 90 per cent of cotton. They are crucial if the province and the country have to achieve the cotton target.

Rabia Sultan, a grower from the core belt, was also of the opinion that the crop was running into a crisis. Absence of water at the sowing stage could hurt the crop beyond redemption and no amount of water at a later stage would be able to make up for the loss.

She said the farmers’ confusion stemmed also from the Indus River System Authority, which had enough water to see the country through the early Kharif. But the Punjab was claiming to be a shortage of up to 30 per cent and distributing water on the basis of shortage, she said. No-one was ready to come clean on the issue and the farmers continued to suffer.

She said the country could not achieve the 13.82 million bales target because besides water, the pesticide supply was another problem. The government had still not cleared the issue and its dialogue with pesticide importers had failed. Though it was claiming to have healthy carryover stocks, the row with the importers which met up to 70 per cent of the local demand, did not send the right signals, she said.

She said the government had also failed to finalise laws for promotion of BT cotton so that the pesticides’ problem could be solved permanently.

Ibrahim Mughal, an agriculture expert from Lahore, believed that the government had increased the wheat procurement target when the farmers in the southern belt had already sold their crop at a price much lower than the officially-declared Rs415 per 40kg. On this account, they suffered a loss of Rs400 million with which they could hardly be expected to meet phenomenal cost of water pumping out of soil.

On the other hand, water availability had dropped by at least 25 per cent in the early Kharif during the last five years. The farmers, she said, had been finding hard to bridge this water gap and now there was an additional 30 per cent shortage. They could not pump out water due to diesel prices and power loadshedding.

According to the expert, the country now needs almost 15 million bales to keep its economy and export running.

Punjab Irrigation Minister Amer Sultan Cheema said this year the Irsa kept misleading the provinces about water availability till the last moment and hampered its planning.