Shortly before the claim emerged online, Maryam Nawaz announced a 400-billion-rupee ($1.4-billion) package to provide farmers with tractors and machinery, and interest-free loans to buy seed, fertilisers and pesticides (archived link).
Street protests erupted in Punjab in April by farmers who slammed the local government’s slashing of wheat purchases to 2.3 million tonnes, down from over four million tonnes in 2023 (archived link).
The Punjab government, which buys a portion of wheat produced in the province to stabilise market price of the staple crop, cited a huge carryover stock that it said left little storage for new wheat (archived link).
Farmers across the South Asian nation have suffered a spate of crop-battering disasters in recent years, including deadly monsoon flooding that engulfed vast swatches of farmland in the summer of 2022.
Similar misleading posts spread on X accounts that back Pakistan’s main opposition party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) — a rival of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) that counts Maryam Nawaz in its ranks. The PML-N formed a coalition with their historic rivals the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), as well as several smaller factions following elections in February.
Direct purchase
A review of Maryam Nawaz’s announcement about the Punjab farmers’ aid package found she was misquoted in the social media posts.
In a livestream of her address on October 28, she said the idea that the government bought wheat directly from farmers was incorrect — not that buying wheat from farmers was “a fraudulent idea” (archived link).
“This is also an extremely flawed concept, a wrong concept that the government buys wheat from the farmer,” she said in Urdu at the livestream’s four-minute 48-second mark.
“The government does not buy wheat from the farmer. The middleman buys wheat from the farmer, which he sells to the government at a higher price.”
She then announced at the nine-minute six-second mark: “And you will be pleased to know that we have decided not to buy wheat from the middlemen.”
She did not say when the administration would start buying wheat directly from farmers, however, the provincial government has typically announced its wheat procurement policies in April each year.
Her comments were widely reported in Pakistani media, including by The Express Tribune, Dawn and The News newspapers — which did not say anything about her criticising the idea of buying wheat directly from farmers (archived here, here and here).
