Pakistan PM’s niece misquoted on govt’s wheat trade in Punjab
A misleading claim spread by supporters of Pakistan’s opposition party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), falsely attributed a statement to Maryam Nawaz Sharif, Chief Minister of Punjab, stating that buying wheat from farmers was a “fraudulent idea.” In reality, Maryam Nawaz had expressed plans to update government policy to eliminate middlemen in wheat procurement.
Supporters of Pakistan’s main opposition party have long spread misinformation about the niece of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Maryam Nawaz Sharif, who became the chief minister of the South Asian country’s agricultural heartland Punjab in February. In the latest case, they misleadingly claimed she said it was a “fraudulent idea” for the government to buy wheat from farmers. In reality, she said the administration was set to update its policy to cut out the “middlemen” to buy the crop directly from farmers.
Maryam Nawaz Sharif became the first woman to be chief minister of a Pakistani province after she took her oath as the head of Punjab’s province assembly in February. She is the niece of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, while her father Nawaz served as prime minister three times.
The misleading post showed a photo of her alongside the quote: “Buying wheat from farmers is a fraudulent idea. Farmers’ problems are not solved by slogans alone.”
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 .
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 .
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 .
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”
“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.
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