Farmers’ protest

In Lahore, the police baton-charged and arrested farmers who were protesting against the policies of the government. One of the protesting farmers was critically injured and later died due to the tear gas shelling. It is a sad reality that the PTI-led government has no agricultural policy. It has also shown its inability to cope with shortages of agricultural products, make timely imports and keep prices under control. Even as the government announced a multi-billion rupees rescue and relief package for textile mills, the farmers who grow the cotton for those mills were conveniently ignored. The agricultural sector is in a slump. Its contribution to GDP is falling. There is little realisation that the prices of agricultural inputs are increasing and the farmers who find that their investment in a particular crop did not bring sufficient profit tend to change over to other crops.

There is no realisation of the damaging impact of the reduction in area under cotton on the textile industry. This year, the area is projected to decrease to 2.2 million hectares – which is 12 percent lower than the last year – mainly due to cotton farmers’ shift to other remunerative crops like corn, rice, and sugarcane. The cotton area is expected to decline due to the potential threat of pest attacks, uncertain weather conditions, and the insufficient availability of certified seed. The government could have played an important role to help the cotton farmers, but it didn’t. Now to keep the textile exports growing, it will have to rely on imports again, this time of raw cotton, causing the country’s forex reserves to shrink.

Azfar Siddiqui

Karachi