Agriculture: Correcting the wheat market

For the last few decades, Pakistan’s agriculture sector has become the happiest hunting ground for crises. Going from one crisis to the next, the entire sector is operating in a firefighting mode and that too without any policy or regulatory effort on the part of the government, allowing the market to determine and extract its windfall. The latest example is of fertiliser. In the last few years, all kinds of fertilisers have gone beyond the farmers’ reach for one reason or another. Of three major fertilisers, potash was the first to fall out of farmers’ favour when its price soared beyond a whopping Rs16,000 per bag two years ago. The squeezed supply deprived the soil of three primary micronutrients — nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK). The next one was Di-ammonium Phosphate (DAP). Its prices tripled in a year (beyond Rs14,000 per bag), and the soil dried up, deprived of nitrogenous and phosphatic supplies, robbing plant health and compromising yield. Market watchers have calculated a 37 per cent drop in its usage this year so far, compared with the last year.