LAHORE: To the fears of farmers another crisis is brewing in the agriculture sector during the Rabi season as two fertilizer manufacturing units remain close despite improvement in the gas supply position and some hoarders are allegedly stocking the available urea in the market.
Two urea producing units Agritech and Fatima-DH have been closed since the supply of natural gas, the main ingredient for manufacturing the fertilizer, to them was cut off on Dec 1, 2019. Their combined production capacity stands at 800,000 million tons per month.
The National Fertilizer Development Centre (NFDC) reports suggest that despite under-application urea fertilizer demand remained 6.228 million tons in the calendar year 2019 and the same is likely to go up to 6.5 million tons in 2020 because of recent cut in the fertilizer price after withdrawal of Rs400 per bag Gas Infrastructure Development Cess (GIDC) by the government.
The total local urea production in 2019 was 6.171 million tons as the government had to import 100,000 million tons of the compost to bridge the gap between demand and supply.
If the two units remain closed, the gap between demand and supply will widen creating a shortage of the manure and opening doors of its sale in the black market.
Pakistan Kissan Ittehad President Khalid Mahmood Khokhar says the looming fertilizer crisis will hit the (politically) sensitive wheat crop already suffering in some pockets of the province at the hands of locust and yellow rust.
Saying there is still time `to address the unfolding of farming disaster`, he calls for restoring gas supply to the shut units by importing the liquefied natural gas available in the international market at historically low prices of $2.5 per MMBTU.
Otherwise, he argues, the government should immediately import 0.5 million ton urea to meet local demand and avert the crisis.
The PKI leader regrets in a statement here that the urea manufacturers are not transferring the benefit of the GIDC cut to the consumers contrary to the intentions of the governments.
