MUZAFFARGRAH: While traveling along Multan-Dera Ghazi Khan Road, one sees several makeshift shops of gurr or jaggery and sugarcane juice, which have mushroomed overnight with the start of the crushing season.

The phenomenal rise in gurr and juice making manifests sugarcane farmers’ lack of trust in selling their product to sugar mills after years of exploitation and government’s inability to ensure them timely payments.

Mohammad Asghar is one such gurr shopkeeper. He said farmers had set up gurr manufacturing plants and juice extracting machines for ready cash.

The major factor for massive gurr production, however, a 100 percent increase in the price from the last year.

Gurr is being sold at Rs4,000 per 40kilogram. Last year, it was sold at Rs2,200 to Rs2,400 per 40 kg but this year it is being sold for Rs4,000 to Rs4,200 depending on the quality. Sugar mills may face the shortage of sugarcane supply because of gurr trend and less cultivation of the crop this year.

The manufacturing of gurr requires a great deal of work.

Ghulam Mustafa has set up his plant in Mauza Umer Budh. He said that a mill that extracted juice from sugarcane was operated by a diesel motor while six people worked in one shift. Of them, two people cut sugarcane from field and also supply them to the plant point. Another two put in cane after cane in the machine to fill up juice canes. Those cans are boiled in large canisters for hours unless it turns into solid slashes of gurr. The miller takes the fourth part of the gurr produced and the remaining three shares go to the farmer.

According to reports, these mills were working in all places of Muzaffargarh. Traders in the Muzaffargarh grain market confirmed that this year the supply of gurr had increased manifold.

Many farmers opting for gurr said that it was the only way left for them to save themselves from being robbed and humiliated by sugar millers. They said gurr millers offered them handy cash or produce to them.

They said they were free to either put the gurr bags on the market or store them for a suitable time.

Earlier, Deputy Commissioner Engineer Amjad Shoaib Tareen said that sugar mills were purchasing sugarcane from Nov 25 and that payment would be made on the spot. He has made teams under assistant commissioners to check private buying spots. He said he had learnt that middlemen were buying cane from farmers at low rates. He said farmers should be paid Rs190 per 40 kilo. He said meetings had been done with mills officials to ensure net payments to farmers.

Published in Dawn, December 21st, 2019