Sugarcane crisis

For the last four months sugarcane growers, along with opposition parties have been protesting what the PML-F’s Mahtab Akbar Rashidi has called ‘economic genocide’. The battle lines have been drawn with the sugarcane growers and opposition parties on one side and the sugar mill owners and the PPP on the other. The problem started in October, which is when the government was supposed to fix the rates for sugarcane. It failed to do so till December, when it set the price at Rs182 per maund. This price, however, seems to exist only in theory as sugar mills owners are refusing to pay the official price and insisting they will only pay Rs155 per maund. At that price, say the sugarcane growers, they cannot even recover the cost of growing the crop. The matter is now being heard in the Supreme Court and the sugarcane growers have been carrying out daily protests, at one point even blocking the Super Highway. The PPP government has abdicated its responsibility to intervene and said it will wait for the Supreme Court verdict. What it should be doing is facilitating talks between the sugarcane growers, the mill owners and the government so that this crisis can be resolved soon.
That the PPP, through its inaction, has effectively sided with the mill owners should not come as a surprise. The opposition parties have raised a ruckus in the Sindh Assembly claiming that the PPP leadership is compromised since they own mills themselves. Whatever the truth of that accusation, it is undeniable that the PPP has strayed from its roots as a voice of the workers and the dispossessed. The PPP is now seen to represent money and land for the most part. Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah has said he will implement the government rate – and then conspicuously failed to do so. Even the Sindh High Court has upheld the price notification of Rs182. The dispute here is a simple one: mill owners are using their political clout to maximise their profits at the expense of the voiceless farmers who grow sugarcane. But at some point they will have to give in. The growers will not sell their sugarcane at a loss and this standoff will lead to shortages around the country soon. Either the government intervenes now or it will have to pay a political price later for allowing this situation to worsen.