Leaders tell farmers to boycott Punjab wheat Mandis

Moga, Mar 28 (UNI) Farmer leader Sharad Joshi, MP, and Bhupinder Singh Mann, Ex-MP and national President Bharti Kisan Union today called on the Punjab farmers not to bring their wheat in the mandis till the Centre announced better remunerative price.

Lashing out at the Centre for its decision of not allowing private players to enter in mandis to purchase wheat, they said farmers were determined not to sell their wheat to the ''monopolist Food Corporation of India, which was responsible for the miseries of the farming community''.

Claiming that Union government was not serious about providing remunerative prices to the farmers, Mr Joshi warned the Centre against the import of wheat at much higher prices at the cost of farmers, who he said, were not even given the reasonable price, forcing them to commit suicides.

Due to anti-farmers policies of the Union government farmers of the country were under debt of more than Rs 40,000 crore, the leaders claimed.

Both the farmer leaders demanded that farmers should be given free hand to sell their produce to private traders when they were getting much higher price than of MSP and threatened that the farmers would continue their struggle to achieve this goal.

They exhorted the farmers to keep their wheat stock at least for three months to ''teach a lesson to union government''. This was the only way that could get them much higher price than of MSP, they claimed.

The Kisan leaders were addressing an awareness seminar attended by a large number of farmers from Punjab and Haryana.

UNI