HYDERABAD: The Sindh Abadgar Ittehad, a farmers’ lobbying group, has called for establishing the official wheat procurement centers as the harvest season is around the corner.
At a meeting of the group, chaired by its President Nawab Zubair Talpur, here on Friday the farmers also raised the issue of the rampant sale of spurious seeds and fertilizer that too at exorbitant rates.
The growers lamented that the agricultural lands in the province were being rapidly converted into housing schemes and commercial buildings.
They requested the government to promulgate a ban on the change of status of the agricultural land to commercial or residential.
The meeting also pointed out that rice crop was being grown in different parts of Sindh in violation of the ban on the crop’s cultivation in those areas.
The farmers demanded that Sindh Seed Corporation and Sindh Agriculture Research departments should either be closed or made practically functional because the two departments were only an unwanted burden on the tax
payers money.
The meeting was told that the fertilizer companies minted a profit of Rs143 billion but still neither quality control was being ensured nor the practice of jacking up fertilizer prices every other month without government’s sanction was being controlled.
The farmers demanded that urea should be sold to them at the prices which were officially fixed by the companies.