Apparently, the Rs 15 billion package announced by the Punjab government is not enough, with the Kissan Rabita Committee saying that it would benefit large landowners and traders. Even though the package puts the money on Kissan cards for 550,000 growers, and even though the farmers have been exempted from irrigation dues and fixed taxes, there is still much unease among farmers about the absence of a support price. The government no longer promises to buy all the wheat it is sold at a certain price. If millers are in competition with the government, they have to offer more than that price. The outcry last year was because the Punjab government did not acquire from the farmers, but from imported stocks, leaving farmers with wheat on their hands, and no way of paying off the debts they had acquired to afford seed and fertilizer.
That the Punjab government hopes to tackle by the Kissan Card Initiative, but its recommendation that the federal government approve wheat export is setting itself up for another disaster. The US Department of Agriculture has forecast a crop of 27.5 million tons this harvest, which is four million tons lower than the record crop of 31.5 million tons last year, which was so badly mismanaged. It is estimated that the country would have to import 1.7 million tons in the coming year. That means any wheat exported will have to be reimported. Any foreign exchange earned by the export of wheat would be blown on reimporting. Even if experts were there, to predict how world wheat prices would go, wheat prices would remain unpredictable. The effect of US tariff is even more unpredictable, keeping in view what a major player the USA in the world grain trade,
This playing fast and loose with national food security, and with hew national food staple, is not really the Punjab government’s fault, or even the federal government’s. It comes of the IMF demand that support prices be ended. The government should have learnt from the example of it processor, which got trapped being forced to import after having blithely exported what should have been the national strategic reserve. The government is already facing problems because of less than deft handling of another staple, sugar (over which the PTI also came a cropper), of which the price is not coming under control. It cannot afford to make another mistake.
