LAHORE: Farmers have demanded that the government ensure availability of affordable fertilisers so that their cost of production may be reduced.

Pakistan Kissan Ittehad president Khalid Mahmood Khokhar said in a statement here on Wednesday that the government must ensure availability of Urea at a uniform maximum retail price across the country.

He said the government must also ensure enough urea availability, either through providing uninterrupted gas supply to urea manufacturing plants or through timely imports.

Referring to Federal Industries and Production Minister Gohar Ijaz’s recent statement that there is no shortage of fertilisers in the country for the upcoming Rabi crop and that gas supply to the fertiliser industry would be maintained at full capacity, guaranteeing uninterrupted production, Mr Khokhar said the farmers are looking forward to a continuous supply of urea at affordable prices during the wheat season, which will begin within days.

The farmers’ leader, however, expressed his concern at the petroleum ministry’s plans of unifying feed gas prices of fertiliser industry at part with industrial rate of Rs1,260 per MMBTU and feared if implemented the plan would lead to increase the urea compost price to Rs4,600 per bag.

He said the farmers were already being exploited by middlemen and were paying approximately Rs100 billion additional cost per annum based on 6.8 million tonnes annual consumption of urea. “The middleman is exploiting the poor farmers by charging a profit of Rs800 to 1,000 per bag over and above the MRP set by the urea manufacturers.”

Parallel to the urea price, he said, the farmers are already paying higher prices for phosphatic fertilisers due to the bullish trend in the international market. To meet food requirements of the growing population and reduce food inflation, use of balanced fertilisers is a prerequisite to enhance per acre yield of wheat.

Compared with the last Rabi, cost of crop production has substantially increased during this year, primarily because of increase in fertilisers, diesel, electricity and other operational expenses, he said. This increase could lead to lesser use of fertilisers, causing low productivity, thus failure to meet the national wheat production target to be set for 2023-24.

If the government is mulling over providing subsidies to support farmers after increasing urea price, the demerits of current direct subsidy mechanism on phosphates needs to be kept in mind; very low redemption rate has been observed against the legitimate claims. Moreover, this voucher-based subsidy mechanism is available only in Punjab province, he said.

Published in Dawn, October 5th, 2023