ISLAMABAD, Feb 6: The Senate Standing Committee on Food, Agriculture and Livestock has expressed concern over what it termed an artificial shortage of fertiliser across the country and asked the food ministry to consider importing 100,000 tons of urea a month to build stock.

The committee told the ministry’s officials on Friday that a buffer stock of urea was necessary to discourage panic buying and profiteering.

It also urged the authorities to check smuggling of fertiliser to Afghanistan and Central Asia.

It asked the government to review its policy, curb smuggling and take action against people who had created the crisis.

It called for cancellation of licences of distributors involved in malpractices and to bar their families from urea business, instead of just reporting incidents of hoarding and profiteering to police. Smuggling, hoarding and black marketing were major ills, besides middlemen who were preventing the agriculture sector from achieving its full potential, the committee observed.

The meeting, presided over by Mohammad Amjid Abbas, witnessed a heated debate on the government’s inability to resolve the crisis over the past two months and lack of coordination among the federal and provincial governments.

The committee observed that farmers were not able to get urea at the official price of Rs670 a bag despite the procurement of 50 per cent of local manufacturers’ stock by the government. It said farmers were compelled the pay up to Rs900 a bag because of mismanagement.

The committee said the government spent Rs16 billion a year on subsidies for fertiliser factories which were also exempted from loadshedding, but the benefit was not reaching farmers who had to wait in queues for hours to get a bag of urea at almost double price.

Some members said influential people bought urea at official price from the government and sold it to farmers at higher rates. They said some influential people were selling urea for Rs1,000 per bag.