LAHORE: Pakistan Kissan Ittehad President Khalid Khokhar has demanded a Rs5,000 per 40kg support price for wheat, warning that farmers may not sow wheat for the next season if the government delays announcing crop policies.
Addressing a press conference here on Tuesday, Mr Khokhar said wheat sowing was about to begin, but the government had yet to announce a policy for the crop.
He said farmers were unable to afford balanced fertiliser use because they were not recovering production costs. DAP consumption, he claimed, had fallen from 2.39 million tonnes to 1.25m tonnes.
‘Give farmers the international market price for wheat and they will deliver record production,’ he said, adding that higher crop prices over previous years had resulted in better yields.
Mr Khokhar said sugarcane cultivation had increased by 16 percent to 2.454 million acres, while sugar production was expected to rise by 25-30pc.
He urged the government to retain sufficientstocks of sugar for domestic consumption until November and export the surplus to prevent losses to growers.
He warned that failure to export surplus sugar would depress sugarcane prices and inflict losses on farmers, with repercussions for subsequent crops.
The farmers’ leader said the growers did not want subsidies but fair prices for their produce, arguing that rising input costs and inadequate returns were discouraging the younger generation to take agriculture as profession.
‘If the government wants deregulation, it should deregulate the entire sector rather than selectively deregulating sugarcane, he said, stressing that food security should remain the government’s priority.
Another leader, Mahmoodul Hassan Bukhari, criticised the government for delaying decisions despite having crop and stock data.
He said the previous delays in exporting the surplus sugar had ultimately shifted the burden of losses onto farmers and warned that farmers might not sow wheat if a policy was not announced promptly.