THIS is apropos the article ‘Sugar mountain’ (April 12). Asad Rahim Khan in targeting the Goliaths of the sugar industry has very perceptively gone beyond them to question the very rationale for cultivating sugar cane in a water-starved country like Pakistan.

“Our frantic push into sugar”, he warns, “is a disaster, because of the nature of our land. In Punjab, to grow sugar is to grow poison. The climate’s wrong, the rainfall’s wrong, the sucrose is low...”

Is it any wonder then that the world’s highest producer of sugar cane is Brazil — home to the world’s largest rain forests? The abundant rainfall there allows bumper harvests, thus making even sugar-based bio-ethanol and bio-electricity economically feasible for the Brazilians.

The writer notes that “in one of the world’s most eco-stressed countries (Pakistan), sugar cane is also a water vampire: it sucks the ground dry (equivalent to three Kalabagh dams), and takes 12 months to grow... It is bad economics to plant, uncompetitive to sell, and absurd to subsidise.”

Is anyone listening in the corridors of power?

Asad Siddiqi
Lahore

Published in Dawn, April 18th, 2020