MUZAFFARGARH, Oct 17: A mafia consisting of ginning factory owners and traders is looting cotton farmers by paying them cheap price of their produce at the peak of the harvesting season, Dawn has learned.

Cotton’s buying price at the opening of October in this district was between Rs2,000 to Rs2,100 per 40kg, but when the cotton picking touched its peak in the latter part of the month, traders in connivance with factory owners started offering meagre returns to farmers.

A trader told Dawn that owners of ginning factories and traders met in a Dera Ghazi Khan cotton factory during the second week of this month where they ‘agreed’ to fix cotton’s buying price at Rs1,600 to Rs1,650 plus taking 3 kg per every 40kg extra cotton from farmers as bundle charges.

Haji Mohammad, a farmer, told Dawn that he took advance from a trader, Ashiq Bhatti of Mahmood Kot, in first week of this month when cotton’s buying price was around Rs2,000 per 40kg but now when he had harvested his crop, the trader had purchased it only for Rs1,600 per 40kg.

This way, he said, the trader had inflicted him a huge financial loss. He said that Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif, during his previous stint as chief executive of the province in the late 90s, had formed teams to check the cotton price and keep it stable.

Malik Nasir Hussain, another farmer, also demanded the formation of monitoring teams, which, according to him, would ensure that cotton was being purchased at appropriate price.

He said that prices of DAP and other fertilizers had gone up even up to four times in the last couple of years but the traders-owners “unholy” alliance was still offering the same cotton price as was being offered before the inflation of agricultural inputs.

An official of the agriculture department said that Multan, Khanewal, Rahim Yar Khan cotton factories were offering “lucrative” price to farmers because of presence of farmers’ associations which were safeguarding their community’s rights, but, as no such associations existed in Muzaffargarh district, traders and factory owners were looting local farmers unhindered.

Sources said that there were 81 cotton factories in this district but no official of the district or the provincial government was there to keep an eye on the price fluctuating on the will of cotton ‘players’ other than farmers.