ISLAMABAD - The government's decision to procure rice from the millers instead of the farmers would not benefit the farmers and it would only benefit the traders and industrialists, as farmers would not be offered rational price of their product, said Ibrahim Mughal, President Agri Forum Pakistan. The government has already announced to procure rice from the millers and sign agreements with them in this regard. The federal govt this year had announced that it would procure one million tonnes of rice paddy from the farmers and claimed that the decision would stabilise the price of the product in the market for the farmers' benefit. This decision was taken in the third week of October but PASCO did not procure a single grain of rice paddy from the farmers and said that they could not procure paddy because the related government departments did not have the infrastructure to procure paddy. PASCO in the previous week announced that due to non-availability of drying fields it was unable to procure rice paddy and it could only procure rice. So the federal government ordered PASCO to procure rice and also announced the indicated price of rice on which it was to be procured. Ibrahim Mughal said that the announcement of PASCO regarding infrastructure non-availability was un-necessarily delayed, but even if it was delayed, he said, they should have started procuring rice promptly. "The government decision is to benefit the millers and not the farmers and the millers are procuring rice paddy from the farmers on a much lower price than the government issued price of Rs 1500 and Rs 700 for basmati and irri rice respectively," Ibrahim Mughal said. The rice growers were being offered a price of not more than Rs 1200 and Rs 600 for the basmati and irri rice respectively and that was not enough to even meet their cost of production. But the govt intervention is missing while the industrialists are looting the farmers, as it is doing nothing to save them, he said. "This attitude of the govt shows no interest in the agriculture sector of the country but shows that it is exploiting the farmers across the country with the connivance of the industrialists," Mughal asserted. Mughal further said that the government instead of helping the farmers has damaged the agriculture sector across the country making it difficult to achieve the wheat production target of 25 million tons for the next wheat crop.