Pakistan Agricultural Storage and Services Corporation (Passco) has not yet arranged wheat bags (bardana) for nearly 0.5 million tons of wheat, while the procurement drive is knocking at the door, officials at Agriculture Ministry told Business Recorder.
Officials said that this year Passco would procure about 1.3 million tons of wheat for which it would require 13 million bags, but at present it has been able to manage only 8 million bags. Passco would require another 5 million bags for purchase of 0.5 million tons of wheat, the official added.
Sources said Passco has only 8 million bags and also lacks storage facilities for the staple food of the country. The public sector has storage capacity of only 4 million tons, while this year it would procure 6.5 million tons of wheat. Devastating flood and poor arrangement for storage damaged thousand of tons of food grain merely due to poor storage facilities.
Although the government is striving hard to build required storage facilities for food-grains and for this purpose Islamic Development Bank (IDB) has recently agreed to provide $95 million soft loan to Passco for building 34 grain storage facilities (steel silos) across the country.
Under the plan Passco has to build 25 grain stores in Punjab, 3 in Sindh, one each in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Jummu and Kashmir. The project would be completed in four phases over a period of four-year: In the 1st phase 9 stores would be constructed from July 2011 to June 2012, in second phase, 9 complexes, while in third and fourth phase 16 complexes would be constructed till end of June 2015.
Officials said that immediate steps are needed for the storage of upcoming wheat crop, as the above mentioned project is long term and would be completed in four years, adding that every year thousand of tons of wheat would be destroyed while lying in the open due to lack storage facilities.
The government has set wheat production target for the year at 25 million tons, which due to favourable weather condition would be achieved as the farmers in the arid (barani areas) have brought large lands under wheat cultivation. Farmers have sown wheat over an area of little over 8.5 million hectares this year, down from 9.13 million last year, when the country produced a bumper crop of about 23.8 million tons of wheat, official said. Officials of the Food Ministry, which compiles the wheat data, said they expected a good crop after last years floods, which devastated large farmlands but also increased fertility in wheat-growing areas.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.