Shortly before the claim appeared 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 seeds, fertilizers and pesticides (archived link).
In April, street protests broke out in Punjab by farmers who condemned the local government’s reduction in wheat purchases to 2.3 million tons, down from more than four million tons in 2023 (archived link).
The Punjab government, which is buying up some of the province’s wheat produced to stabilize the market price of the main crop, cited a huge carryover stockpile that it said left little storage space for new wheat (archived link).
Farmers across the South Asian country have suffered a wave of crop disasters in recent years, including deadly monsoon floods that inundated large swaths of farmland in the summer of 2022.
Similar misleading messages spread on . The PML-N formed a coalition with their historic rivals, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), as well as several smaller factions after the February elections.
Direct purchase
A review of Maryam Nawaz’s announcement on the relief package for farmers in Punjab revealed that she had been misquoted in the social media posts.
In a livestream of her Oct. 28 speech, she said the idea that the government was buying wheat directly from farmers was false — 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 is buying wheat from the farmer,” she said in Urdu after the four-minute and 48-second livestream.
“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.”
Then, after nine minutes and six seconds, she announced, “And you’ll be happy to know that we’ve decided not to buy wheat from the middlemen.”
She did not say when the government would start purchasing wheat directly from farmers, but the provincial government has typically announced its wheat purchasing policy in April each year.
Her comments were widely reported in the Pakistani media, including by The Express Tribune, Dawn and The News newspapers – which said nothing about her criticism of the idea of buying wheat directly from farmers (archived here, here and here).
