ISLAMABAD, Oct 10: The federal government has been warned of a looming food crisis next year as a result of delayed wheat sowing during the current season, a senior government official told Dawn on Friday.

The official said as the sugar mills are not lifting sugarcane for crushing, the farmers are being forced to delay the sowing of wheat.

The official said the Minister for Food, Agriculture and Livestock Sardar Yar Mohammad Rind has written letters to the ministers of finance, commerce and industries to immediately resolve the dispute between the sugarcane growers and sugar mills so that wheat sowing could start well in time.

He has proposed to convene an emergency “national meeting” with provincial authorities to persuade the sugar mill owners to immediately start the crushing. The meeting, proposed by the agriculture minister, is expected to be held early next week, the official said.

The agriculture minister has said that if sugarcane crushing is not started immediately, it would delay wheat sowing and create wheat shortage next year and the government would have to import the commodity.

The millers have also told the government that they were facing difficulties in repaying more than Rs10 billion of the banking sector and had nothing left to pay to the growers to lift more sugarcane.

The official said the prime minister secretariat has directed the Trading Corporation of Pakistan (TCP) not to lift sugar from the mills until they start crushing sugarcane.

The Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the cabinet had decided in its last meeting to purchase 100,000 tons of sugar from the mills for buffer stock through Trading Corporation of Pakistan so that surplus sugar stocks lying with the mills could be reduced.

The sugar mills, sources said, were not satisfied with the decision because they still had a surplus of more than 500,000 tons of sugar for which they have been seeking government’s support for export.

The government already had faced a loss of Rs700 million when it asked Trading Corporation of Pakistan to purchase 100,000 tons of the commodity for exports about three months ago and therefore now it had refused to help export more stocks.

The sugar industry could not export sugar on its own because of depressed international prices.