Pakistan Kissan Ittehad Demands Agricultural Emergency Amid Mounting Crisis

MULTAN: Pakistan Kissan Ittehad (PKI) President Khalid Mahmood Khokhar has urged the federal and provincial authorities to immediately declare a nationwide agricultural emergency to protect struggling farming communities from total financial ruin and avert an impending food security crisis. Addressing an urgent press conference in Multan, the agricultural rights leader warned that persistent bureaucratic delays and poor policymaking are systematically crippling the country’s most vital economic pillar.

Khokhar sharply criticized the government’s failure to take decisive, timely actions to support growers, pointing out that agricultural distress carries severe compounding repercussions across multiple seasons. “The government consistently fails to take timely decisions, ignoring the reality that when a single crop incurs catastrophic losses, it inevitably destabilizes the next three consecutive harvest cycles,” Khokhar stated, highlighting that soaring fertilizer prices, prohibitive electricity tariffs, and erratic market pricing mechanisms have rendered farming increasingly unviable for smallholders.

The agrarian sector remains the cornerstone of Pakistan’s national economy, employing over 37 percent of the national labor force and directly supplying critical raw materials to textile and export industries. Sector analysts caution that continuous drops in farm profitability threaten domestic supplies of essential staples such as wheat and cash crops like cotton, forcing the state to spend scarce foreign exchange reserves on costly food imports amid tight fiscal constraints.

Calling for urgent intervention, the PKI chief demanded that the government immediately restructure power tariffs for tube wells, ensure direct subsidies on vital farming inputs, and establish robust support pricing mechanisms ahead of upcoming sowing seasons. Khokhar warned that if authorities fail to engage agricultural stakeholders and address these structural grievances through formal emergency relief measures, farmer unions nationwide will have no alternative but to stage widespread demonstrations.