November 25, 2003	Tuesday	Ramazan 29, 1424

MULTAN, Nov 24: Federal and Punjab agriculture departments have urged the pesticides firms to immediately import additional quantity of herbicides needed for the wheat crop in the wake of rise in their demand due to increase in official procurement price of the commodity for the year 2003-2004.

In their separate letters, Plant Protection Department (PPD) of the federal food and the extension wing of the Punjab agriculture department have requested the members of CropLife Pakistan and Pakistan Crop Protection Association to ensure availability of the herbicides as per the expected demand in order to avoid any shortage at the critical time of their demand to ward off unnecessary broad-leave and grass weeds from the wheat fields.

Referring to a meeting chaired by the state minister for agriculture, Sikander Hayat Bosan, the PPD letter said that the Punjab agriculture department had said in the meeting that an area of around 6 million acres was expected to be treated by the herbicides this year in the province while the current inventory position of the pesticides firms could prove sufficient only for an area of 2.4 million acres.

While in his letter dispatched on November 22 last, the extension wing director general of the Punjab agriculture department also reminded the pesticides firms that they were asked to furnish a list of their respective stocks by November 17 but the response in this regard was still awaited.

It is interesting to note that on one hand the agriculture departments of both federal and provincial governments are urging the pesticides firms to import additional quantity of herbicides while on the other they have yet to shift the three widely-used wheat herbicides in the country from the restricted import category of form-1 to the free import under generic name category of form-16. It may be added here that a meeting of the special sub-committee of the federal agriculture ministry’s Agricultural Pesticides Technical Advisory committee held on November 20 last remained inconclusive on the subject of placing the three wheat herbicides on form-16.

Currently, some three firms have almost a monopolistic hold over the sale of the three important wheat herbicides in the country. Analysts fear that shortage of the wheat herbicides may repeat the situation that the cotton growers had to confront this year owing to the pesticides shortage at the crucial time of boll formation to combat the flare-up of American and Army bollworms.

The government has increased the official wheat procurement price to Rs350 per 40kg this year, from Rs300 per 40kg. The pundits at the federal and provincial agriculture departments are expecting that the wheat acreage will surpass the target of about 20 million acres due to the price incentive as it was happened when the wheat procurement price was fixed at Rs300 per 40kg in 1999-2000 from the previous year’s Rs240 per 40kg. That year the country harvested an all-time bumper wheat crop of 21.9 million tons against the domestic requirement of about 19 million tons.