Govt likely to allow wheat export

ISLMABAD Mafias active in hoarding and smuggling of essential commodities have reportedly convinced the government to allow export of wheat while the new crop is officially estimated to fall short of 25 million tons target this year.
According to well-placed sources in the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, the government has estimated the upcoming wheat crop to be around 23 million tons that is 2 million tons less than the target for this year.
Had there not been the available stock of 3 million tons, the country would have already gone into a wheat or flour crisis ahead of the new crop, which is most likely to start pouring into the market on March 20 in Sindh, in the first place. The mafias through the flour millers have convinced the government to allow only 0.2 million tons of wheat products export, the sources said.
They have ensured the government that there would be no smuggling as there was hardly any price differential between the rates of flour as well as wheat here and in Afghanistan, they added. Apparently, it seems to be a plausible proposal to export part of the surplus stocks being carried forward from the previous year, but no one could guarantee against no smuggling of the fresh crop that carries an essential price differential for better quality, the sources said. The sources were of the view that the mafias were to replicate what they did during the Musharraf regime when the then Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz allowed the wheat export for just a week and ended up with an unprecedented crisis in the country.
As officials are now telling the government that they were having nothing less than 3 million tons of wheat as surplus stock from the previous year, Shaukat Aziz himself had announced record crop wheat before allowing its export.
Authorities kowtowing the mafias were also presenting a wrong picture of parallel prices of wheat and flour especially in the neighbouring country Afghanistan as a disincentive for the smugglers. But they naively or otherwise undermined that Afghanistan was a war-torn country and hoarders and smugglers were at large in and around there.
Besides smuggling local level hoarding was another challenge for the government to check as the five outfits responsible to procure wheat including PASCO, and Food Departments of all the four provinces were simply incapacitated for adequately picking up the perishable commodity from the farmers in time. That is why perhaps, the official procurement target has also bee reduced to 7.5 million tons as against the last years government level purchase of 9 million tons.