DADU: Growers and small scale traders of wheat have accused food officials of having given 800,000 gunny bags in Dadu and 600,000 gunny bags in Jamshoro districts to big traders and influential persons associated with Pakistan Peoples Party.

Growers complained to Dawn on Thursday that they had not so far received gunny bags. They were made to visit offices of food officials who were conspicuously absent from their offices in the two districts, they said.

They appealed to the chairmen of National Accou­n­t­ability Bureau, Anti-Corruption Establish­ment and Sindh Chief Minis­ter’s inspection team to launch a thorough probe into unfair distribution of gunny bags and mega corruption in the food department of the two districts to save small growers from imminent losses.

They said their wheat stocks were lying in the open and they were forced to sell them off at lower prices to traders who were offering them Rs2,500 to Rs2,550 per 100 kg bag, at least Rs700 less than the official rate of Rs3,250.

The traders were then selling the wheat to food officials at government fixed rate and making windfall profits, they said.

The president of Sindh Abadgar Board’s Dadu chapter, Dharam Das, complained that despite production of a bumper crop this season, small growers were facing huge losses because the food officials were not purchasing wheat from them directly.

Big traders of Karachi, Hyderabad, Lahore, Peshawar, Islamabad and Quetta had pitched camps in several parts of Dadu in collusion with food officials to purchase wheat from small growers at very low rates. They were smuggling most of the wheat to Afghanistan and Iran, he alleged.

Moreover, he said, mill owners, hoarders and influential traders had also jumped in the fray to buy wheat cheaply and supply it to food officials at government fixed rate.

Frustrated growers in Phulji, Sita, Piarogoth, Mehar, Thariri Mohabbat, Khudabad, Chhandan, Moundar, Aminiani and Jhaloo are holding protests against food officials for their failure to provide them gunny bags.

SAB Johi chapter leader, Mohammad Omer Jamali, said that all the wheat harvested earlier in March in Johi taluka was being purchased by traders as officials had sold all the gunny bags to them after receiving Rs500 to 550 per bag.

A small grower of Dadu, Abdul Qadir, said that 200,000 gunny bags had been given to MPAs and MNAs. The district food controller of Dadu, Zahid Hussain Unnar, had bought the post after paying Rs3 million bribe to the food department. Hence, he and other officials were not even sitting in their offices, he said.

The situation was not different in Jamshoro where small growers complained that almost all gunny bags had been handed over to traders and influential persons.

The areas of Sann, Manj­and, Sehwan, Bhudhapur, Unnarpur, Khanoth, Bhan, Talti and Lucky areas were the worst affected with regard to distribution of gunny bags, they said.

An affected grower of Talti, Aziz Rajput, complained to journalists that he had cultivated wheat on 500 acres but he had not received any gunny bag yet. All the gunny bags meant for Arazi, Talti, Sehwan and Bhan areas were being distributed among influential persons associated with PPP, he said.

Published in Dawn, April 8th, 2016