Farmers demand budgetary support for ailing agro-economy

The Sindh Abadgar Board (SAB), a group lobbying for farmers, has deplored that despite lending their crucial support to the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the outgoing fiscal, the growers kept facing insurmountable challenges and financial woes.

A meeting of the board on Sunday, presided by Syed Mahmood Nawaz Shah at its office in Hyderabad, pointed out that inflationary trend of inputs' prices, unavailability of electricity, climate change and manipulated decline in the commodity prices kept hurting the farmers.

According to the board, the prices of most of the major commodities of Pakistan like cotton, oil seeds and wheat remained suppressed in the outgoing year in comparison to 2022-23. The minimum price of cotton was fixed and notified at Rs8,500 per 40 kilogram but the growers were paid around Rs5,200 per 40 Kg by the market.

On the other hand the input prices, like urea, jacked up from Rs1,700 to RsRs4,600 per bag in the last three years. "Even worse, last year the farmers were compelled to pay as high as Rs5,500 per bag of urea due to black marketing."

The farmers contended that not just the commodity prices were being manipulated to their detriment, other disturbing factors like the export curbs and extensive imports were also hurting agro economy. The SAB urged the government to announce controlled prices of the inputs in the upcoming budget.

They recommended that the government should establish a climate change endowment fund so that it can be used to meet expenses for relief and rehabilitation of the farmers whose crops and livestock are destroyed by the extreme environmental events. The board lamented that a crucial government department like Sindh Seed Corporation, which owns around 6,000 acres of land to fulfill the objective of seeds research and development, has remained moribund for long.

The SAB suggested to the government to hand over assets of the corporation to the private sector for the seed development. The farmers also drew attention of the government towards adoption of smart agricultural technologies such as satellite imagery, remote sensing, smart sensors and nodes and smart weather stations.

The technologies can help climate risk mitigation, on farm information, pest and disease predictions, water accumulation and drought conditions and flooding, in addition to providing reliable information to the banks for credit and recovery purposes. The meeting proposed that duty free import of these technologies should be allowed.

The board also asked the government to set up hubs and clusters for horticultural production and processing in the areas where horticultural products are abundantly available besides providing the incentives like electricity, subsidies and credit facility in those hubs. They underscored the need to establish laboratories for pesticide testing in order to reduce the processing times at ports and airports for exporting perishable commodities.

Reforming the department of plant protection to help horticultural exports, provision of loans to small and medium sized growers and investment by the federal government in biotechnology are some of their other demands. The farmers complained of suffering 12 or more hours of outages in the rural areas and urged the government to sincerely address this issue.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 3^rd, 2024.