Punjab’s urea crisis

[LahoreEstate]

A CROP of anger is being sown in Punjab’s fields of despair. Wheat farmers across the province are flustered and frustrated over their failure to get as much urea fertiliser as their crop requires.
Reports of angry protests over the shortage of the fertiliser as well as photographs showing farmers standing in long queues to get it refuse to go away from the inside pages of newspapers.
If, in the coming days and weeks, the supply and distribution of urea remain as bad as now, protests can turn ugly and the queues give way to major quarrels.
The Punjab government seems to be aware of the dangers, although the response it has come up with to ward them off is certainly inadequate.
On Thursday, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif set up a committee to monitor and report on the supply and delivery of fertiliser. For desperate farmers who need five million bags of urea as quickly as possible, this is like telling a hungry child that a suitable diet for him is being mulled over.
The urgency of the situation should not be lost on the government, and a handful of over-occupied politicians and bureaucrats meeting and issuing memos can hardly resolve the problem.
Mr Sharif would do well to take some concrete steps like cutting the red tape and removing administrative and logistic bottlenecks to expedite the inland arrival and distribution of urea that has already landed in enough quantity at the country’s ports to fulfil local needs.
He can certainly arrange the emergency transportation of the fertiliser if he is serious about tackling the problem which otherwise runs the risk of becoming a crisis that Mr Sharif himself acknowledges can reduce Punjab’s wheat output by as much as 30 per cent.
Such a drastic decrease in wheat yield will drag down the whole economy with it and will require huge and costly imports. But, as seen in previous years, imports do not ease supply constraints after local wheat production falls short of the target.
That wheat shortages have had dangerous political fallouts goes without saying. Anyone mindful of such fallouts should know better than writing memos and holding meetings.

http://www.dawn.net/wps/wcm/connect/Dawn...crisis--bi