"CHEENI KUM"-PAKISTAN'S SUGAR CRISIS!

Half a century ago, a sugar shortage helped bring down Pakistan's military regime. For the past few weeks, a similar shortage has led to skyrocketing prices and empty market shelves, sending consumers and officials into a panic. The drama has been marked by riots and protests, arrests and raids, accusations of price-fixing and hoarding, rationed distribution in cities and direct intervention by the Supreme Court.

It is a matter of great concern that despite having a strong industrial and agriculture base, the sugar industry is forced to operate below 70 per cent of its capacity due to mismanagement of the Government (or a well considered policy of the Mills owners sitting in the Parliament). Majority of the politicians of Pakistan either in the govt. or opposition are the owners of sugar mills. This is why the owners of country's sugar mills have been the main targets of public wrath and official intervention. Critics and consumer activists charge that these agro-industrialists have conspired to fix prices and hoard sugar stocks.

One of the newspapers described Pakistan's sugar-mill owners as "a particularly odious clutch" of tycoons who are "fleecing the pockets of the poor." Which I thought was pretty true yet amusing!

Such exaggeration has provided delicious distraction this season for a nation that has been exhausted and frightened by a relentless barrage of bad news: suicide bombings, floods, tensions with Afghanistan and India, and mounting troop casualties as Pakistan's army battles Islamist extremists in the northwest.

Pakistan is a nation of sugarholics, who heap the crystals in their breakfast tea and devour mithais and cakes at every special occasion. Sugar may be far less important to the national diet than wheat or cooking oil, but it looks much larger in the national psyche. Moreover, the government officials are coming up the lamest ideas asking the masses to cut down their sugar intake rather than teaching the sugar mafia a good lesson! The reality is that by the time sugar prices are controlled by the good for nothing government, the few who had planned this mischief would have made enough profit to pay to shut a few mouths or anyone from speaking up against them. Soon, we will forget this also, and move on for more torture at the mercy of the powerful few while paying the cost of their mistakes and corruption.

One can only hope that a solution is found to this shortage of sugar, as shortages of other foods such as wheat and other staples are becoming more and more imminent. We should begin to worry about severe food shortages in the coming years as they are starting to take shape.