Middlemen continue to exploit sugarcane growers

Official regulation of crushing season, procurement price delayed

HYDERABAD:

As complaints of alleged exploitation of farmers by middlemen and sugar mills mount, the Sindh Abadgar Board (SAB) has urged the Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah to resume the official regulation of sugarcane crushing season and procurement price. In a letter addressed to the CM on Monday, the SAB's President Mahmood Nawaz Shah requested him to implement the Sugar Factories Control Act, 1950, which has provided a framework to notify cane crushing season and to fix the buying rate.

"You may know that sugar mills used to start crushing in October, and last year, as the government did not issue the notification, the sugar mills started in December," he pointed out. "If the government doesn't notify the season or the price, the growers will be left at the mercy of sugar mills. This is contrary to the spirit of the law and it has tilted the balance in favour of sugar mills."

According to him, small and medium-sized growers have been affected the most due to the price and season's deregulation. He lamented that a sizable number of the small growers are now switching to cultivation of wheat crop on the lands on which they used to grow cane, all because of the alleged exploitation.

Shah recalled that since 2025 the provincial government had stopped issuing the notifications, pointing out that the said deregulation had occurred for the first time in many decades.

The act was amended in 2009 with the Sindh government allowing the sugar mills to start the season not later by November 30, extending the earlier deadline of October. The growers, since then, have kept complaining that they were neither taken on board before the amendment nor any empirical research was conducted to determine if sugarcane was maturing by October to with delay by November.