Daily Times

Mohammad Ismail Rahu, the Sindh Minister for Agriculture, has warned of the severe food crises in the country in the coming months as according to him, the selected rulers and their puppets had either hoarded or smuggled around 10 million tonnes of the wheat after procuring from the farmers. Rahu talking to media persons in Badin on Monday said that authorities of the federal government this year again instead of purchasing the wheat grains from the farmers and growers at Rs 2,000d per maund had allowed the middlemen to purchase wheat from Punjab to earn the windfall profits through the dirty tricks. He alleged that due to ill-conceived and corrupt practices of the Imran Khan-led PTI government created the flour crises in the country twice last year. Rahu alleged that insane rulers imposed on the country had made no export and import policies for the agriculture of the country adding he said that they had already messed up things for the farming community of the country. Rahu said that the federal government had made false claims that the farmers had collected Rs 680 billion extra for their crops, in fact, the federal government had deliberately avoided to increase the wheat prices for the farmers in order to make trillions of rupees through wheat and flour-like last year.

Rahu said that PTI governments in Punjab and KPK bought the wheat at Rs 1,800 per maund from the producers, whereas, Sindh government on the directions of PPP chairman, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari under his pro-farmers policies, had purchased wheat from farmers of Sindh at Rs 20,00 per maund. The rulers imposed on the people of the country had already created enough mess and they were least interested to address the issues of the people associated with the farming sector, Rahu said and added that it was the vision and mission of PPP leadership to provide all the required facilities to the farmers and growers. He made it clear that authorities of Sindh government like the previous year had bought enough grains to cater to the needs of the consumers of the province adding he said that they would not allow anyone to hoard the grains to create the crisis in the coming months. Rahu said that the Sindh government, unlike the insane PTI rulers, had launched a number of comprehensive plans to boost the different modes of agriculture. ” It is high time to focus on the modern technologies to get more products of the crops by using fewer resources” he added and said that he was himself monitoring various schemes launched by his department across the province.

He informed that despite the limited resources they were trying to line the watercourses to save water and were also focusing on the bio-saline agricultural products even in the desert districts like Tharparkar. He said that the Sindh government had already banned the rice cultivation in the left bank canals of the province to avoid water scarcity during the Kharif season.