FAZAL SHER

ISLAMABAD: The farmer’s community has hinted launching a countrywide protest against the government’s failure to meet their demands regarding reducing input costs and providing other incentives to the agriculture sector.

Pakistan Kissan Ittehad (PKI), farmers’ representative organization, has called an emergency meeting to devise future strategy after the government failed to meet their demands with respect to abolishment of General Sales Tax (GST) on fertilizer, agriculture machinery and reducing electricity tariff for agriculture tubewells.

“The government has not only turned deaf ear to our demands but also imposed Value Added Tax (VAT) on fertilizer and 10 percent GST on cotton ginners in the budget 2019-20 which will further increase cost of production,” President PKI Khalid Khokhar stated while talking to Business Recorder.

He said that the government had assured the farming community that it would abolish 2 percent GST on fertilizer and GST on agriculture machinery. “We had also requested a reduction in electricity tariff for agriculture from Rs 6.85 per unit to Rs 4 per unit that was proposed by the special committee on agriculture headed by National Assembly Speaker Asad Qaiser,” he said.

Khokhar said that the price of fertilizer including Urea and DAP are much higher in the country compared to prices in neighbouring India: in Pakistan DAP is priced at Rs 3,395 while in India it is Rs 2,350 (in Pakistani equivalent rupees) while price of Urea in Pakistan is Rs 1,830 while it is Rs 526 in India (in Pakistani rupees).

The PKI president said that following imposition of VAT, the price of DAP will further increase by Rs 90 and Urea by Rs 120 per bag. In the budget 2019-20, the government has imposed 10 percent GST on cotton ginning owing to a reduction in cotton putty price from Rs 4,500 to Rs 3,500, Khokhar said.

He said that the parliament on the 1st of May passed a resolution calling for imposition of regulatory duty on the import of cotton and fixing of support price but the government allowed import of duty free cotton. “The government also did not allocate a single penny for agriculture research in the budget 2019-2020,” he said.

Khokhar said that PKI will hold a meeting in the next couple of days to devise a future strategy to urge the government to meet their demands. “Now we have no option but to either fight to get concessions or stop farming,” he said.

A senior official of Ministry of National Food Security and Research (MNFS&R) when asked about the steps taken for uplift of agriculture sector said that Rs 12.5 billion has been allocated for various projects of his Ministry compared to Rs 1.8 billion in fiscal year 2018-19.

He said that 13 government projects in five different sectors of agriculture worth Rs 296 billion in financial year 2019-20 on cost sharing basis between the federal and provincial governments are also part of developing agriculture sector. For the first time after devolution of agriculture, the share of 13 federal government projects of five key sectors of agriculture over the next five years will be Rs 92.5 billion, he said.