Pakistani Farmers demand justice from International Trade Regime
Pakistan Kissan Ittehad (Alliance of peasants) organized a one day seminar on “implications of international agreements on small farmers” at Chistian, Pakistan. More than 250 farmers including women attended the seminar. The speakers emphasized on calculating the cost of implementing multilateral trade agreement as well as other loan agreements with international financial institutions. Farmers were of the view that input cost has been increasing day by day for instance the bag of DAP fertilizer is now being sold in Rs. 1100/ while the prices of output have either declined or are stagnant. The poor small farmers are being pushed toward extreme poverty and impoverishment.
The farmers were quite disappointed and angry over the government handling of the wheat procurement. According to the farmers the per 40 kg production cost of wheat is Rs. 428, however government fixed Rs. 415/- as a support price for the 40 kg of wheat. Unfortunately government has not procured the wheat at fixed rate from small farmers and they have to sell their wheat to middle men way below the fixed price, which is will discourage the food production in Pakistan.
Mr. Mustafa Talpur of ActionAid Pakistan while addressing the seminar said that WTO agreement especially the agreement on Agriculture is going to affect millions of poor farmers in Pakistann>. Since developed countries have increased their farm support from $ 243 billion in year 1986-88 to $ 279 billion in year 2003. The farm support is encouraging the farmers in developed countries for excessive production and dumping thus reducing the global commodity prices. In current WTO negotiations rich countries are not offering substantial cut in their subsidies, which is bad news for the Pakistani farmers. In addition to WTO, Mr. Talpur said that under the loan condition of World Bank and ADB, Government of Pakistan has implemented the policies which are not supportive to the small farmers such as elimination of subsidies and privatization of seed market as well as planned privatization of research.
The seminar demanded that government should protect the domestic agriculture sector from import surges, provide necessary support to farmers and develop an agriculture vision for food security and livelihood promotion.
