JI launches protest campaign against wheat price crisis in country

KARACHI: Jamaat-e-Islami central chief Hafiz Naeemur Rehman has announced launching a protest campaign against the wheat price crisis in the country to support the farmers demanding a “fair” price for their produce.

Speaking at the Karachi Press Club’s ‘Meet the Press’ programme on Monday, Rehman noted a stark disparity among the farmers, saying that the agriculture sector was composed of 96 per cent small-scale farmers who had one or two acres of land, yet the rest of the four per cent owned 40 per cent of the country’s total cultivated land.

He said that the current production of wheat is more than what the country has produced in the past 50 years, and despite having 2.1 million tonnes of wheat in stock from the previous year, the government ordered the import of three million tonnes of wheat worth $1 billion.

The JI leader said that whoever — whether present in the current government, the previous caretaker government or the bureaucracy, or a businessperson — colluded in this malpractice should be brought to accountability and put in jail, for they embezzled the national exchequer in the times when foreign coffers were empty and the country was running on the International Monetary Fund’s bailout packages.

He said that on the one hand the government was burdening the public, especially the salaried class, with hefty taxes on basic utilities such as gas and power, while on the other, it was doing “import frauds for the benefit of a handful of people, including senior bureaucrats, politicians and businesspersons”.

He demanded that the vast tracts of agricultural land unfairly acquired by feudal lords since the time of the British be redistributed among the landless farmers. He pointed out that these farmers who have no platform to raise their voice would have the support of the JI in their struggle.