LAHORE: Keep a handkerchief handy. Pakistan’s most reliably “aggrieved” constituency is back in the news; the sugar mill owners.
According to Zaka Ashraf, chairman of the Sugar Mills Association, the sugar industry is on the brink of collapse. The statement arrives at a moment when the ordinary buyer is paying more for sugar than he would like, and when the family grocery list is already being trimmed every month.
For the household, an increase in the price of sugar is filed away as one more line item, somewhere between the electricity bill and the school fee. For a billion-rupee industry, a dip in margins is announced as an existential emergency. Both statements can be made in the same week, and only one of them will be treated as a crisis worth an urgent meeting.
That asymmetry is the story. Nobody seriously argues that a struggling industry should be ignored. Sugarcane growers, mill workers, transporters and retailers all depend on the crop cycle, and a genuine collapse would hurt far more people than mill owners. But the public is entitled to ask what the numbers actually show, and to ask it out loud.
Households in Lahore have watched prices move in one direction for most of this year, as the city’s cost of living has documented. Flour has its own long-running story, including a wheat import decision that did not stop retail prices from rising. Electricity remains a monthly shock severe enough to reach the floor of the Punjab Assembly. Fuel relief schemes have arrived, but unevenly, as the federal government’s relief package is rolled out.
Against that backdrop, “the industry is collapsing” is not a conversation-ending argument. It is the opening of a conversation. What were production and sales volumes this season? What did the mills pay growers, and when? How much sugar was exported, at what price, and with what support? What happened to retail prices in the weeks after those decisions?
These are not hostile questions. They are the questions any regulator, any parliamentary committee and any consumer would ask of a sector that touches every kitchen in the country. If the industry’s position is as difficult as its representatives say, published data will make the case far more effectively than an appeal to sympathy.
And if the data shows something else — that the squeeze on the consumer has been sharper than the squeeze on the balance sheet — then the public deserves to hear that too, from an authority with the mandate to examine it.
There is a version of this debate in which the public is told to stop worrying about inflation, utility bills and daily expenses, and to worry instead about profit margins in a large, well-organised industry. That version is not persuasive to a man who is already deciding which item to remove from the dinner table.
The reasonable ask is modest. Publish the figures. Let an independent authority verify them. If support is needed, explain who it goes to and what the consumer gets in return. A billion-rupee sector is entitled to make its case in public. The household paying more at the counter is entitled to see the arithmetic behind it.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of The Lahore Times.
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