ISLAMABAD: After weeks of farm lobby’s bickering over falling prices of major crops, the government and the opposition seemed close to each other in the National Assembly on Friday on the idea of cutting production costs instead of raising support prices every year to save Pakistan from what opposition leader Khursheed Ahmed Shah called agricultural crisis.

“If the government did not pay attention to this, there will be a big loss to the country resulting in a dangerous increase in inflation,” Mr Shah told the house in a speech, warning of another serious crisis, besides the prevailing one relating to terrorism and power shortages.

Several landowning lawmakers from both sides of aisle spoke bitterly during the previous lower house session in October and three days of the current session about the government either not fixing new support prices or its institutions not buying the produce, some of them accusing Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s 18-month-old government of caring little for the farm sector and more for his own class of traders and industrialists.

Playing on the same theme, the leader of opposition from the Pakistan People’s Party talked of what he called a general perception that agriculture flourished whenever the PPP came to power and suffered under Mr Sharif’s pro-business Pakistan Muslim League-N.

Only a day earlier, the government had no immediate answer after a PML-N landowning lawmaker from Punjab, Raza Hayat Hiraj, challenged it in the house to explain if a subsidy of Rs7.5billion or Rs8 billion was given to cotton ginners instead of growers. In the same sitting, a leading government ally from Sindh, Ghous Bakhsh Mahar of Pakistan Muslim League-F, lamented “there is nobody to buy our paddy”.

To cheers from his own party’s lawmakers, Mr Shah warned of a “backfire the government may not be able to withstand” if it did not pay attention to the present troubles of the agriculture sector.

But he soon got what appeared as an encouraging response from National Food Security and Research Minister Sikandar Hayat Khan Bosan, who said the prime minister had set up a committee to consider ways to lower the cost of agricultural production rather than raising prices of crops every now and then.

Though he did not elaborate the production costs, the minister seemed to be referring to inputs like fertilisers, seeds, agricultural machinery and electricity charges to run tube-wells.

Noting that agriculture was now a provincial subject under the Eighteenth Amendment of the Constitution, the minister said the committee would take provincial governments on board during its deliberations and asked for Mr Shah’s help in getting help from the PPP’s Sindh government

Mr Shah later assured every possible cooperation from the Sindh government.

Contrary to Mr Bosan’s information, Mr Shah did not get a similarly encouraging response to his demand that the government reduce the prices of petroleum products like petrol and diesel in their next fixation by at least Rs15 a litre in view of more decline in world oil prices.

Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Sheikh Aftab Ahmed said the new rates, to be applicable from Dec 1, could take the decrease for two months to around Rs15 a litre rather than for only the next month.

HALAL FOOD LAW IN OFFING: The parliamentary secretary for science and technology ministry, Raja Javed Ikhlas, told the house that his ministry had proposed a law to ensure production and use of only halal food items in the country.

Responding to a call-attention notice from five members of the government-allied Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-F party, he said the draft of a Halal Authority Bill had already been sent to the cabinet for approval before it could come to parliament for adoption as law.

The call-attention notice complained of “sale/purchase” of prohibited, or haram, edible items in the country, and one of its authors, Ms Shahida Akhtar Ali, said she had seen candies of a foreign brand sold in Islamabad citing alcohol and pig gelatin among its ingredients in a not-easily legible small print on its label.

After JUI-F leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman personally intervened to demand urgent action in the matter, the parliamentary secretary said he would check the present status of the bill and seek stern action against people found to be selling edible items with non-halal ingredients.

Published in Dawn, November 29th , 2014