July 24, 2007	Tuesday	Rajab 08, 1428

LAHORE, July 23: Some 37 per cent increase in the price of DAP fertiliser in the last six months has cost farmers Rs16 billion, which can damage the kharif crop beyond redemption, say farmers’ bodies.

Talking to Dawn on Monday, farmers said a bag of DAP was available to them at Rs900 till January 2007. Its market price was Rs1,060, when the government announced a Rs250 per bag subsidy, bringing the price down to Rs810. But the marketers did not decrease the price and continued selling it at Rs900.

Now, the commodity is being sold at Rs1,240 per bag, which shows a 37 per cent increase in the price. The price is higher in spite of the fact that the government claims to be subsiding a bag by Rs470, they said.

Farmers use 35 million bags of DAP fertiliser during the kharif season. That means an additional burden of Rs12 billion on farmers.

In the absence of the DAP, the cotton crop becomes vulnerable to pest attack of mealy bug. Farmers have to invest around Rs1,000 per acre to deal with the bug. That means an additional investment of Rs8 billion if all the eight million acres of the crop have to be cleared of the bug, they said.

Ibrahim Mughal of the AgriForum says: “The increase has mocked the government’s claim of promoting balanced use of fertiliser. In India, a DAP bag costs Rs700 and the price has been stable around this figure for the last decade. In Pakistan, the price fluctuates by around six per cent a month. No sector in the world could absorb that kind of added fiscal pressure.”

Idrees Khokhar of the Farmers Associate Pakistan says that officials’ excuse that there is an increase in international price of the DAP, it should not affect the domestic production. The government allows domestic producers to follow international trends at the cost of farmers. Also, there is no check on importers either. Importers had a stock of 1.8 million DAP bags when the international market registered an increase in the price.

The importers increased the price of DAP bags, which they had imported in the pre-hike period. Unfortunately, farmers pay the cumulative cost of all these policy hiccups and failure of governance, he said.

There is no independent body to ascertain that how much international price increases and how much of it is passed on to farmers, says Farooq Bajwa of the Punjab Water Council. In the absence of such a body, the whole pricing mechanism becomes suspect and vulnerable to abuse by the importers.