A planned protest about the drop in wheat prices

This year’s huge wheat crop in Pakistan appears to be turning into a nightmare for farmers as the market has fallen and they are compelled to sell the primary food crop for significantly less than the government-mandated support price.

Farmers in Punjab are so displeased that they have scheduled a statewide demonstration for April 25 as the region produces more than 75% of the wheat harvest overall.

“If farmers are still being exploited by middlemen and the government, we won’t harvest wheat crop next year,” said Kissan Board Pakistan Central Chairman Sardar Zafar Hussain Khan on Tuesday.

The wheat harvest season has started, yet there’s still no official government purchase policy to be found. “We are launching the protest, but if the government did not come up with an immediate solution, then we may convert the protest into a sit-in,” Khan said, adding that “as a result, wheat prices have plunged up to Rs1,000 per 40 kg as middlemen have started exploiting the situation.”

Although farmers’ groups assert that the Punjab Food Department and Pakistan Agricultural Storage and Supplies Corporation have not yet started buying the grain, the government has fixed the support price for wheat production at Rs3,900 per 40 kg this year. The farming community in Pakistan is going through one of the worst periods in its history due to losses on two fronts. The president of Pakistan Kissan Ittehad, Khalid Khokhar, stated, “On the one hand, the cost of producing crops has doubled since 2023, while on the other hand, the prices of major crops have on average dropped 25%.” “These two factors have made farming unprofitable.”

Farmers’ groups claim that in 2023, farmers paid market exploiters a staggering sum of Rs300 billion, over and beyond the retail rates set by the fertilizer sector, as a result of urea black marketing. Farmers protested loudly, but the government did not enforce its writ to guarantee urea availability at the designated retail pricing.