HYDERABAD: The Sindh Abadgar Board (SAB) general council, which held its meeting here on Sunday, demanded a better planning for and due attention to the agriculture sector by government.
The meeting discussed rising cost of agricultural inputs and declining returns on growers’ produce.
It said that last two years of disruption, created by government with its knee-jerk policy drift, had negatively impacted this sector.
The meeting said that a complete deregulation might not be implementable in the country, and that it was detrimental to the interests of farmers and consumers in its current shape and form.
The council session was presided over by Mahmood Nawaz Shah and attended by Dr Zulfiqar Yousfani, Syed Nadeem Shah, Dr Bashir Nizamani, Malook Nizamani, Aslam Mari, Imran Bozdar, Taha Memon, Syed Salman Shah, Veeram Mehar, Khalid Memon, Khalique Khoso, Arbab Ahsan,Mustafa Nawaz Shah, Murad Ali Shah and others.
According to the leaders, the so-called ‘deregulation’, primarily in wheat and sugar cane, had causedlossestothetuneof trillions of rupees to growers over the last two-and-ahalf years.
Under the deregulation, government did not fix the support price (or fixed a very low price as in the case of wheat last year) and continued to import commodities whenever required. And a ban on their export was also there. ‘This had resulted in commodities, growers and consumers being held hostage by cash-rich middlemen and processors to exploit them.
SAB reminded the government that while there was 29pc inflation in the economy for sustained period, not a single agricultural commodity price grew by that proportion.
Prices rather declined or, at best, remained the same; on the other hand, input prices continue to rise exponentially.
This has now created a viability gap in the agriculture sector.
The SAB meeting pointed out that growers were unable to invest asmuch as required and small and medium-sized farmers were in distress.
The subsidies of provincial government for just one crop and 350,000 small growers in Sindh were not even reaching to 15pc of small farmers.
Moreover, the current policy was incentivising cashrich, exploitative middlemen to buy cheap and sell expensive.
It said that government was unable to understand that it was critical for commodity prices to be commensurate with prices of inputs and inflation. There may be certain years in a sector when it makes a loss, but it could not continue for years and for all commodities.
The current policy to not let commodities’ prices increase is not tenable.SAB believed that solution to this quagmire was to work toward creation of competitive markets. In this policy, exports and importsneedtobe opened.
Regulation should be to the extent of preventing conniving in businesses, fixing prices and manipulating markets.
The Competition Commission of Pakistan was mandated to perform this function but has not been effective. In this weak regulatory regime and governments’ lack of determination to open exports, weaker sectors in value chain, such as agriculture, would suffer and were already suffering.
The meeting demanded that the price of sugar cane be fixed at Rs525 per 40kg and that of wheat at Rs4,500 per 40kg.