The matter is very simple. You need two bars of molasses for your expenses and you have a whole sack of molasses lying around. The benefit of gold is that if someone tells you no, apart from this sack, if you buy two more sacks, you will certainly not take those two sacks because you already have more than you need. Something similar is currently happening between the government and the farmers.
According to the available information, Punjab and Sindh provinces which is the most important in terms of production and consumption of wheat, if the province has 2.3 million tons of wheat and it is more than its requirement, how will it buy wheat from the farmers and How will it be possible to purchase wheat at the official price of 3900 rupees per maund? This problem has become a problem for which wise minds are sitting together and trying to find a solution.
Until yesterday, we used to proudly tell about the tractor rally and protest of the neighboring country’s farmers and today we are facing the same situation, so we have no solution other than inquiries. One solution could have been to at least buy the extra wheat from the farmers but here too a tragedy awaits us every year that we don’t have warehouses to store the wheat. On Multan belt we have to store wheat under open sky by putting tarpaulin. And we have seen what has happened to such deposits in floods and rains.
If the farmer is worried, it will definitely be a blow to Pakistan’s agriculture. If the cost per maund is more than 5000 and the price per maund is only 3900 rupees, then how will the farmer cultivate the next crop and how will he meet the cost of this crop? Children’s marriage, their education, building a house, family welfare, debt repayment, etc., are related to the new crop for the farmer, we are not thinking about it.
The sad thing is that even this support price of wheat is not being met and currently wheat is easily available at Rs 3000 to Rs 3600 per maund. The big zamindar will suffer this blow, but the small zamindar is in a double dilemma that he can neither sell the wheat at a low price that does not cover the expenses nor can he keep it as there are no regular warehouses to store it. As a result, he would sell this wheat to the arhats at high prices, which the arhats would store and arrange to sell the wheat bought at cheap prices at high prices.
It can be said that Pakistan is an agricultural country, but the way the agricultural policies are being made, it is not far-fetched that in the near future the title of being an agricultural country will be taken away from us. And the situation we are facing now is that the tragedy of under-cultivation for the next season is waiting for us, that the small farmer will not cultivate more wheat than he needs and we will have shortage of wheat.
