March 10, 2008	Monday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 1, 1429

LAHORE, March 9: The DAP fertiliser price on Sunday hit a record Rs2,900 per bag in the local market -- more than 300 per cent increase in the last 14 months which has added to the woes of farmers who are wondering if there will be a full stop.“And it is not only the price factor, but the unavailability of the all-important fertiliser too has become a problem,” they say. Thanks (ironically speaking) to the high prices alone, the DAP use, which is crucial for growth of cereal crops, has dropped by almost 35 per cent -- from 32.5 million bags last year to 20 million bags this year.

The farmers demand that the government should try to find out a permanent solution to the crisis because most of the international factors guiding the DAP prices are spinning out of its control, especially with globalisation taking effect.

“The government has limited options, that is, either make the subsidy flexible or offer farmers the international price of wheat,” Muhammad Idrees Khokhar of Farmers Associates Pakistan said. By flexible subsidy, he meant that the government could decide that the farmers would be given a bag at a fixed price and absorb the international price fluctuation, whatever it is. The other option was to link wheat price with the international market as it had done in case of input -- the fertiliser.

In that case, he said, the government extracted itself from fluctuations and let the farmers absorb them or adjust their cropping pattern according to the international market demands.

The FAP had been arguing with the government for long to take one of the positions and bring about some stability in the agriculture market produces, he said.

“Since raw material and production of the DAP is limited the world over, some middlemen and hoarders are involved in trading,” according to Muhammad Rafique, a fertiliser trader from the city. Knowing the production and world cropping pattern, he said, they controlled the flow and hoard it to their benefit. All those countries that imported the DAP fertiliser faced such situation every year, he added.

Pakistan, being dependent on 65 per cent DAP import, had always been vulnerable to such price fluctuations, and it would remain so as long as it depend on import, Mr Rafique said.

He said the DAP price in the international market had gone beyond $1,200 per ton, breaking all previous records. It was hovering around $300 in January 2007 and had increased 300 per cent in the last 14 months.

Ibrahim Mughal of AgriForum Pakistan said: “It is not only price of DAP that has gone beyond the reach of farmers, other fertilisers like Nitrophas has its price risen from Rs600 per bag last year to Rs1,700 this year. On the fertiliser head alone, the production cost has gone up by Rs12,000 per acre in the last few months. No sector can absorb that kind of financial burden,” he said.

What he had to say to the government is that it must wake up from slumber to know whether it was conspiracy to rig the use of fertilisers in the country because it was not only the prices of fertilisers that were going up on a weekly basis, but availability had become no less a trouble. The result was drastic decrease in the use of fertilisers which meant the agriculture sector getting deeper and deeper into quagmire, Mr Mughal said. — Staff Reporter