ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) has warned that the country is heading towards another flour crisis as only less than 20 days of wheat stock is available in the country.

The warning came from PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari in a statement issued by the PPP Media Office here on Wednesday in which he also slammed the federal government for fixing the wheat purchase price at Rs1,800 per 40 kilogram, alleging that the government was making a false claim that it had increased the subsidy price up to 400 per cent.

In fact, he said, the increase was only 28pc as the government had raised the purchase price from Rs1,400 to Rs1,800. On the other hand, he said, the federal government might keep a subsidy price of Rs1,800 for wheat, but the PPP would not allow oppression of farmers in Sindh and the relief price would be Rs2,000 per 40kg in the province.

Mr Bhutto-Zardari said that Sindh had raised the purchase price to Rs2,000 which was an increase of 42pc.

Govt’s plan to split PIA into two companies criticised

“Today, for the first time in the history of the country, the support price of wheat is not the same in all the provinces and Imran Khan is responsible for this oppression of the farmers of Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan,” he alleged.

The PPP chairman said that prices of everything from fertilisers, seeds and pesticides to agricultural machinery and electricity had gone up by 150pc and, therefore, Rs1,800 subsidy was an injustice with the farmers.

Mr Bhutto-Zardari claimed that actually the federal government wanted the purchasing price of wheat to be fixed at Rs1,600, but when the PPP fought for the farmers, the federal government had to increase it a little bit. He reminded the people that the federal government had already created two wheat crises in three years.

It was due to poor planning of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) government that today only two to two-and-a-half weeks of wheat stock was available in the country.

“If the crisis is not dealt with, the country may once again face a shortage of flour,” he said, adding that the wheat crop landed in Punjab in May last year and more than 10 million tonnes of wheat disappeared in July.

He said Prime Minister Imran Khan should ask his friends how the artificial crisis was created by smuggling wheat to Afghanistan. The PPP chairman said that it was a shame that Pakistan, a wheat producing country, was now importing wheat. He said one of the reasons for devastation of the economy was that the ruler of Pakistan was unfortunately not even familiar with “alphabets of the word agriculture”.

Mr Bhutto-Zardari said that the PPP government had in the past made Pakistan a wheat exporting country in just one year. The PPP government, he added, had increased the relief price by 47pc in the first year and 52pc in the second year.

PIA plan

Meanwhile, in a separate statement, PPP’s parliamentary leader in the Senate Sherry Rehman expressed concern over the government’s plan to split Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) into two companies.

“The Tabahi Sarkar (destructive government) has literally crashed PIA by compromising several Pakistani pilots with clean licences, got the airline grounded in EU capitals after the ‘Licencegate’, sold PIA assets abroad via crony shell firms and are now cannibalising ‘old PIA’ to create new business ventures. This is a new low,” she said.

Ms Rehman said that about 2,000 PIA employees had been forced to take voluntary redundancy and now the plan was to lay off half of its 14,000 employees.

“The Tabahi Sarkar is Awam Dushman (people’s enemy) in unprecedented ways as all they do is to sack people in Covid times, instead of creating jobs. If this is their revival plan for PIA then we shudder to think what they will be doing next,” she added.

“Why did the government recently mislead the people by claiming PIA losses have been brought down? If this was the case then what losses are they talking about now? The national flag carrier posted a net loss of Rs34.6 billion ($226 million) in 2020, its loan has caused an overall loss of Rs460bn, the iconic Roosevelt Hotel in New York has been sold and our profitable international routes were given to competitors,” she said.

PIA, she said, was still reeling from the government’s blows, and now employees were being cited as the problem, when in fact it was the sheer incompetence of this government which was to be blamed.

The statement from Ms Rehman came a day after Minister for Information Fawad Chaudhry told reporters that the federal cabinet had discussed a plan to split the national flag carrier into two companies and returned the matter to the Economic Coordination Committee for some changes.

Mr Chaudhry had also blamed the previous PPP and PML-N governments for the PIA crisis, alleging that they had made recruitments in the airline on political grounds.

Ms Rehman said that PIA flights had been banned in Europe and the US because of the aviation minister’s “callous statement”.

Published in Dawn, April 29th, 2021