SAHIWAL - PML-N Division leader and former Okara Municipal Committee chairman Ch Muhammad Saeed has said that the price of potato continued to rise as the government failed to control rates despite the country had recorded bumper crop. He demanded that the Punjab Food Minister should resign forthwith.
Talking to this scribe, he called upon the government not to harass the cold storage owners. He alleged that the government officials were conducting raid on cold storages and forced them to bring potato to market, although cold storages had stocked 70 percent potato as seed.
“First, the government allowed non-stop export of potatoes, which resulted in exhausting their stock in the local market.” He said that the government should have set a target for potato export if the country has produced the vegetable in surplus, and no one should have been allowed to export the vegetable beyond the set target.
Answering a query, he said that growers were going through a serious crisis due to high prices of fertilizers, exploitation of sugarcane growers by the millers and lower prices of different crops including rice and cotton and increasing input prices.
He demanded the government to reduce urea rates and fix it at Rs1,000 per bag to give some relief to the growers.