LAHORE, Jan 21: The federal government will procure four million tons of wheat this year and is trying hard to export the present stocks, Federal Minister for Food and Agriculture Khair Bakhsh Junejo said here on Monday.

Speaking at an Agriculture Conference organised by the Kissan Board Pakistan, the minister expressed his optimism about the future of agriculture sector under the World Trade Organization regime. He said the only problem was the quality of our crop.

Iraq, he said, had recently returned two-thirds of the wheat exported to the country on account of the presence of foreign substances, although it expressed satisfaction with the quality of wheat. The farmers, he said, had also not been able to maintain the quality of cotton. Once the growers became quality-conscious, he said, there would be nothing to worry about the WTO.

The government, he said, had launched a three-pronged policy to boost the agriculture sector which involved almost 44 per cent of the labour force and 70 per cent of the population. The sector, he said, also formed the basis for 80 per cent of the exports.

A Crop Maximizing Plan, he said, had already been launched on 800 acres in Sargodha division. The results, he said, had been encouraging. The government, he said, had allocated Rs200 million to expand the plan to 100 villages in the next Kharif season.

The government, was also planning to create fora for sharing information about agriculture products. He said a commodity exchange, linked initially to 60 major markets in the country, would display prices at each centre to help the farmers. He said it would help the farmers understand the market better even without real time updates.

Research, he said, was another area to which the government was determined to bring dynamism. He said allocations for research and development were being increased.

The government, he said, was also prioritizing the farm products. The government, he said, also wanted to attain self-sufficiency in tea and oil seeds and save precious foreign exchange consumed by their import. A project, he said, had already been launched to grow tea in the NWFP. An oil seed programme, would follow soon. Self-sufficiency, he said, might not be more than a decade away.