I had a bizarre encounter with our corner shopwallah the other day, which went something like this.

‘Ayee?’ (Has it come?)

‘Abhi nahin. Kal try karna.’ (Not yet. Try tomorrow.)

So I did, and he still didn’t have it. This continued for several days, our conversation going from business-like, to desperate, to sinister. Until, one fine morning, as I was buying eggs, he said: ‘Bari mushkil say mili hai. Abhi lay lain. Khas gahakon kay liye hai. Pindi say mangwai hai, Rs. 70 rupees fi kilo kai hisab say.’ (Found it with great difficulty. Take it now. We’ve kept it for special customers. Brought it from Pindi, for Rs. 70 per kilo.)

Now Mr. Khan – doe-eyed and probably in his early twenties – has been a shopkeeper at the Khattak store for over five years. It’s one of those tiny shops with a little linoleum counter peeling at the corner, a pay phone for those days when you’ve left the mobile at home, and shelves swollen with merchandise. He even stocks such exotic items as tinned sardines and pitted olives in a small shelf of imported goodies next to the counter. We often do not have to pay him immediately if we do not have the cash. And he is scrupulously honest, returning change when I forget.

By the end of this particular transaction, however, I felt a little dirty. For one thing, I know and he knows, that he is supposed to sell for Rs. 40 a kilo. For another, he is the Khattak shopkeeper, not a drug dealer. And yet, that is exactly what it felt like. This is not cocaine or contraband; this is plain ol’ sugar. In a country that is fifth on the list of top sugarcane producers in the world, should sugar have disappeared from the markets?

I have to admit to a little guilt when I made chocolate cake after my five-year-old pestered me for days. Four cups of sugar in the cake, five tablespoons in the icing. But a tepid middle-class conscience is nothing to the hordes invading the government-run Utility Stores, where the poor wait for four hours to buy a kilo of the sweet white stuff. They are not just seething, they are enraged. And rightly so.

The ‘cheeni ka bohran’ or sugar crisis has been going on since Ramazan. First, it was blamed on the usual pre-Ramazan profiteering: jacking up the prices of essential commodities to take advantage of the month of fasting and feasting. Wholesalers and millers were hoarding sacks to create an artificial shortage. Then it turned out that sugar cane growers had switched from sugar cane to wheat because the government had raised the wheat support price to give incentives to farmers to grow more wheat. In other words, the sugar crisis was apparently a derivative of the wheat crisis.

The government conducted a few raids and issued statements on how international prices had also gone up. A minister even said people should consume less because it is ‘injurious to health.’ Yes, Pakistanis like their tea sweet and they may be the third largest consumers of sugar in Asia. Yes, over-consumption leads to diabetes and obesity and all manner of ills. But even if sugar is not a right of the masses, does that mean it has to be a luxury?

The activist Supreme Court has ordered that sugar be made available at Rs. 40 a kilo. As the tussle between the highest court of the land, the Pakistan Sugar Mills Association (PSMA), the federal government and the Punjab government demonstrates, it’s not really the economics that’s the problem.

In a TV news report, one angry sugar customer at a Utility Store lashed out at ‘the sugar mafia.’ The Competition Commission of Pakistan has called it ‘collusive behaviour’ on the part of the Pakistan mill owners association and buyers.

In an excellent four-part analysis of the sugar market, development economist Dr. Adeel Malik wrote:

If there is one industry that best reflects the underlying power structure in Pakistan, it is sugar. The role of politics is central; from the sanctioning of a sugar mill to its financing and operation. It is instructive to look at the ownership structure. Of the nearly 78 sugar mills, at least 50 per cent are owned by politicians or their family members. They sit on all sides of the political divide, represented in cabinet, treasury and opposition benches.

If the solution is systemic and political, price-fixing, recovering stockpiles, importing the expensive international variety and making it available at Utility Stores are then short-term measures. The government – running dangerously low on credibility as it is – could demonstrate that it genuinely represents the people’s interests; it could recover footing for a people lurching from crisis to crisis.

Or it could order an inconclusive inquiry, as happened in the case of the 2006 sugar crisis.

Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda.