Daily Times

The way the Punjab government chose to deal with protesting farmers, whose only sin was demanding higher support prices for wheat and sugarcane crops, was simply appalling. First authorities were asleep at the wheel as an unprecedented but preventable locust invasion ravaged the agriculture crop. Then they were again caught behind the curve when it came to dealing with the impact of powerful seasonal rains. And when farmers were finally driven to desperation and some of them took to the streets in outrage, the government decided to give them vintage Punjab police treatment – complete with baton-charging, tear-gassing, roughing up and a rather large number of arrests.

Even some of the government’s closest allies in Punjab, PML-Q most noticeably, are very cross about the incident. If anybody has suffered throughout this cycle, from plantation to harvesting, it is the farmers. And now that this has counted as a very difficult year for them, for no fault of theirs of course, the government was expected to use this time to make up for some of their losses and devise a better working plan for the future. Yet it chose the approach, of trying to scatter the protestors through use of force, that it used to criticise others to no end when it was in the opposition.

All the commotion that followed the police action, which no doubt proved rather embarrassing for the government, forced the provincial law minister to rush to the scene and reach an agreement with the farmers; though at the time of writing it is not known if any official assurances have been accepted at face value or not. Yet there does seem a delayed realisation on the part of the government that its actions weren’t received too well by anybody. What and sugar are precisely the things whose out of control prices have unnerved the public. And harming farmers quite literally amounts to playing with the country’s self-sufficiency in agriculture, which can have very grave consequences.

There is a very clear need for the government to revise its policies with regard to support prices. It must also make sure that such a situation, where its own carelessness and indecision actually threatened the viability of the nation’s food basket, never arises again. Allowing discontent to grow among farmers is a red line that no country can afford to cross. Hopefully the government understands as much before it is taught a painful lesson by market forces. *