PPP seeks action against officials responsible for locust swarm

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has expressed grave concern on the locust infestation in the country and demanded that action may be taken against the incumbents responsible for not taking action on time and demanded heads to roll on locust disaster

“The PTI government, including the prime minister, his cabinet and the minister of Food Security must answer for this gross negligence and delayed action against the locust infestation in its beginning stage,” Said Information Secretary of the PPP Parliamentarians Dr Nafisa Shah in a statement on Monday.

Dr Nafisa Shah said it is estimated by the government’s own sources in a report that the locust invasion is spreading on 100 percent area of Pakistan and 25 percent crops in the concerned areas are already affected with estimated losses of Rs75 billion.

She said, “Former president Asif Ali Zardari had alerted the government on the locust swarm last June 2019 on the floor of National Assembly. Why was no national emergency declared then?”

Subsequently, she said PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari demanded that government should act on it otherwise it may turn into a full-fledged calamity and PPP parliamentarians kept raising this issue in the Parliament. “Yet no serious action was taken and no financial or technical support was offered to Sindh govt where the locust swarms had attacked,” she said. She said in fact the government used an outmoded aircraft of the 50s for aerial sprays despite the pilot warning days before the aircraft crash that he was “fighting with an injured horse.” She said that the pilot of the crashed aircraft had written before incident that, “I am flying Ap-AMB on will power. It requires immediate work on it but we do not have the alternate available.”

She questioned that who is responsible for putting pilots’ lives at risk and the loss of Captain Shoaib Malik and engineer Fawad Butt. “This merits enquiry as well. The present government is not just ineffective, it is a danger to the country as has been amply demonstrated in this issue,” she said.