LAHORE, June 5: The Punjab government plans to form committee for monitoring water distribution and check adulterated pesticides in the province, Lt-Gen Khalid Maqbool (retired), the Punjab governor, said on Wednesday.

The governor was speaking at a well-attended Critique of Cotton Crop arranged here by the Agriculture Department. The participants included federal ministers Razzak Dawood and Khair Bakhsh Junejo, president’s advisor Shafi Niaz and the provincial minister for agriculture.

The committees, the governor said, will visit every pesticide shop and water outlet to eliminate irregularities.

The governor said, people wanted quick solutions to their problems and tended to ignore that the government was equally poor.

He said about 91 per cent of the land belonged to small farmers. Small farmers, he said, looked towards the government to provide for their needs. He said the government was committed to farmers’ welfare but had to act according to its own resource constraints. This left a wide gap between what it could do and what the farmers expected. The government was trying to bridge the gap but had not quite succeeded so far. Corruption, weak monitoring and inefficiencies amplified the problem.

The government, he said, had done its best to keep the wheat price stable. As a result the open market price was currently around Rs280 per 40 kilograms. Since the federal government purchases cotton, the province has a limited role to play in that regard. The Trading Corporation of Pakistan would be asked, however, to ensure price stability by meeting its procurement targets.

The governor said subsidy might be allowed on operation of farm tubewells in October and November.

He said the government had asked pesticides importers to start local production. The government, he said, planned to pay compensation for the damage caused by mining of land in border areas.

Earlier, former minister Abdus Sattar Lalika complained that the TCP had failed to make even a verbal commitment to buy cotton. An assurance, he said, could have helped stabilize the market. Former National Assembly speaker Fakhar Imam said lack of research has taken a heavy toll on the crop yield. After reaching 11.4 million bales in the early nineties, he regretted, the yield had dropped to 7.4 million bales. The federal ministers left early as they had to attend some meetings in Islamabad. They did not address the meeting.

Farmers’ representatives spoke mainly about the price crash and the limited TCP intervention. Representatives of the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association recommended better quality as the only assured way to get better prices.