LAHORE: Farmers will hold rallies in various cities on Thursday (tomorrow) to demand that the international money lenders write off loans of Pakistan and other poor countries as well as compensating for the economic losses of Pakistan due to a climate change.

Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee General Secretary Farooq Tariq and others told a press conference here on Tuesday that protest rallies would be organised in Lahore, Karachi, Multan, Toba Tel( Singh, Shilcarpur and other towns on Thursday to coincide with the annual meeting of theIMF and World Bank in Morocco.

The demonstrators would also seek cancelling debts of flood victims in Kasur, Pakpattan, Depalpur and other Punjab districts and allocating funds for their rehabilitation, they said.

They said IMF and World Bank policies had failed across the world and had led to an increase in poverty and inequality instead of reducing the same because these lenders force governments of the poor countries to impose more taxes on the poor, increase taxes on utilities for paying back the loans.

The two institutions, they said, in cooperation with other lenders hadspreadanetofdebtsresulting in economic destruction and pushinghundreds ofthousands ofpeo-ple below the poverty line. The fossil fuel projects they financed played havoc with the climate in the countries, which had no role in this destruction, and these poor nations were not being compensated for the losses, the farming community leaders regretted.

They demanded that Islamabad should immediately stop paying back foreign loans and the funds thus saved should be diverted towards welfare of the down-trodden segments of society and rehabilitation of the farmers who were financially damaged in the recent floods.

Those who were present during the press conference included Saima Zia, Zaigham Abbas and Hasnain Jameel Fareedi.