Maize (Corn) prices across Punjab have declined by 10-12 percent over the past two weeks despite hoarding and refusal to sell by both farmers and traders across the board.
Maize is grown as a cash crop across the country and is highly capital-intensive in terms of expenses incurred on land preparation which consumes a lot of diesel and electricity both of which have spiked multiple times in the past year. Fertilizer prices have also increased and it all adds down to the higher cost of production.
The cultivated area of maize has increased by 25 percent across Pakistan from 1.3 million hectares in FY2018-19 (FY19) to 1.7 million hectares due to the huge industrial demand for poultry, dairy and processed food items. Its national production has also jumped 50 percent from 6.8 million tonnes to 10.1 million tonnes in the same period.
On the other hand, farmers are having to sell their produce for pennies. While there is always a lot of smoke around domestic commodity trade where farmers blame some mafia behind the shadows for keeping the price trend in their favor and traders often acknowledge that, there are a lot of logical reasons as well.
“The current corn entering the market has been damaged due to rain and farmers having such produce have nowhere else to go which is driving down the prices. High-quality corn with low moisture is entirely absent from the market and so it cannot be exported as well,” commented Usman Mehar, Progressive Farmer and Founder at Roshan Kissan Cooperative.
It highlights the need for affordable warehousing and storage facilities for farmers, so they can protect themselves from post-harvest losses inflicted by climate change. State Bank of Pakistan launched Electronic Warehouse Receipt Financing last year for exactly this purpose but companies providing such facilities are very few and farmers who know about it are fewer.
There is also a need to establish small processing units near villages which in addition to the quick processing of farmers’ produce will also result in a huge skilled workforce and employment generation.
Leaving the market future in the hands of climate change threatens market stability, undermines farmers’ social and economic protection in the long run and can even shift them to other less productive crops. If a farmer of maize, cotton and wheat is unable to gain profit from growing crops, he has no incentive to not sell his land to housing societies eating the agricultural land.
For now, it threatens the farmers in remote areas, so it isn’t making the news, but if keeps on happening, it can become a larger problem of national food security as the long lines of sugar make the news more than the plight of sugarcane farmers, but it will be late by then, so the time of doing something is now.
Source: Pro Pakistani