LAHORE, Feb 24: Farmer organisations on Sunday blasted the Punjab government for excluding them from the formation of wheat procurement policy, calling it an “operation that it executes every year to cover up follies of the food department.”

At a meeting here, they demanded that the Punjab governor should immediately convene a meeting of “all stakeholders” to rehash the procurement policy.

Bilal Israel Khan, a farmer from Rahim Yar Khan, wondered that the chief secretary invited every one to the meeting, but the farmers — the actual stakeholders of the procurement policy. The farmers were, in fact, deliberately kept out of the procurement process to save “a few bureaucrats” of the food department, he alleged.

“No one can really rationalise the exclusion of farmers from the procurement policy-making, except for concealing certain policy hiccups or attempts at individual and institutional corruption,” he said.

The farmers had been demanding a role in policy-making so that things remained smooth during actual procurement and the policy could be adjusted to ground realities which the farmers knew better than any other official or government agency, said Syed Tariq Shah, a local farmer.

He said the farmer bodies were directly linked to the field and knew which area was yielding what. It could help the department facing a glut in one area and deficit in the other because of misleading procurement targets.

He said the government agencies normally based their policy on the previous year’s figures which sometimes became misleading. Explaining his point of view, Mr Shah said harvesting at Tharparkar (Sindh) had already started but the yield had dropped to a paltry 18 maund per acre against the last year’s 24 maund. However, the crop in central Punjab looked better than the last year. All these realities kept changing and needed policy adjustments and the farmers could be the ideal guides, he was of the opinion.

Ibrahim Mughal of AgriForum said the governor should himself call a meeting of all stakeholders and cast himself in the role of a leading guide in order to “save farmers”. “The bureaucracy has its own method of working which does not inspire confidence among the farmers about their efficiency and intent,” he believed.