‘Greed and desperation’

“President Zardari is a very devious man,” said the old farmer. “Whatever he gives you with one hand, he will take away twice as much with the other.”

I spent last week in Multan, visiting mango farmers and wholesalers and talking with fertiliser dealers and cotton brokers and all variety of agricultural folk. And everywhere I went, I heard the same story. It went something like this.

Back in 2009, agriculture was booming. The newly announced increases in the wheat support price had funnelled enormous quantities of money into the hands of growers, at the expense of urban consumers.

Meanwhile, cotton prices were spiking rapidly, driven by harvest failures in China and India. At its peak, the price of cotton nearly tripled, giving another boost to our farmers who plant cotton immediately after the wheat is harvested.

Buoyed by growing incomes from both major crops — wheat and cotton — agriculture boomed with a vitality that was the envy of its urban brethren.

The government made hay while this sun shone. They presented the growing agricultural incomes as the cornerstone of their economic vision, a vision that sought to rectify the urban bias in Pakistan’s economic policies.

“Given the enormous price inducement, the agriculture sector is likely to spearhead economic growth in the next fiscal year as well,” noted the Economic Survey in 2011.

The “enormous price inducements” were no laughing matter. “As a result of inordinate spike in prices of major crops, an additional amount of Rs342 billion was transferred to the rural areas in 2010-11 alone,” noted the next year’s Economic Survey.

But then the tide turned. First with the floods, then with the growing fiscal squeeze of the government, and then again with the sharp curtailment of natural gas to the fertiliser industry.

All three came at the same time. And cotton prices quickly fell back to where they had begun. A small set of revenue measures, designed to help bridge the growing fiscal deficit, brought a 16pc GST on all agricultural inputs, causing the prices of pesticides and fertiliser to rise. Then came the adjustment in the price of feedstock gas for the fertiliser sector, along with massive curtailment of supplies.

One particular producer, leveraged heavily in optimistic anticipation of continuing supplies, found itself forced to bundle its debt-servicing costs into the price of urea fertiliser, creating a boon for other manufacturers who greedily followed suit even though they had no new plant to depreciate, no new debts to service.

The price of urea fertiliser in 2008 was Rs682 per bag. By 2012, it had reached Rs1,700. Look at this another way. In 2008, farmers across Pakistan spent Rs75bn on urea fertiliser. In 2013, that number had climbed to Rs194bn.

Pesticides and tube wells became prohibitively expensive as well, forcing farmers to forage in the informal cottage industry products for cheaper alternatives. Farmers are increasingly resorting to homemade fertilisers and other chemicals like zinc because they cannot afford the factory fertiliser any more.

Industry sources say this is the first time in their history that they have seen off-take figures for urea drop for three consecutive years. Dealers in agri-markets corroborated this.

All the while, a cottage industry in cheaper alternatives is booming. Agri-chemicals, fertilisers and pesticides made in drums and sold in empty one-litre soft drink bottles are growing by the day. Not all of them are worthless, some may actually work, but their impact on the soil and more importantly on yields is yet to make itself known.

A far more insidious impact is also visible. From Vehari Chowk to the GT road, and all along the GT Road itself, we saw large real estate development projects springing up on agricultural land. Forty-year-old mango orchards are being chopped down to build upper-middle-class bubble colonies, with names like Paradise and Dreamworld.

And these are the lucky ones, those growers whose land was adjacent to a main road or a highway.

Further inland, on the road to Shujabad for instance, you can see dozens of brick kilns spewing their awful black smoke. Those farmers who couldn’t fetch much of a price for their land are selling their soil — prime agricultural top soil from the Chenab basin apparently makes the best bricks.

We stopped at one such kiln, and while my cameraman filmed, I casually engaged one of the workers in conversation. “Where do you buy the mud from?” I asked.

“From farmers around the area,” he replied, waving his hand towards the farms that were all around us. “How do you make the purchase? Do you go there or does the farmer bring the soil here?” I asked.

“We go there, dig the soil and keep digging and carrying it away until we hit clay, then we stop and pay the farmer.”

So what happens to the farm afterwards? “Its ruined, of course. Won’t be good for anything. There’s normally a crater left, about 100 feet or so in some cases, and they sell it to a trash disposal contractor.”