LAHORE, June 6: Punjab on Monday conceded a slight slide in wheat production and put the final figure at 17.3 million ton against the original target of 17.5 million ton. Counting the factors affecting the final yield, Agriculture Secretary Fayyaz Bashir said weather, which remained favourable throughout the season generating hopes for a bumper crop, turned bad during the maturity period of the crop. It helped shrivelled the grain and negatively affected the yield, he said.

He said rains, winds and thunder storms during harvesting played the final part and helped reduced the yield by a few hundred tons. But, all said and done, the crop was far better than the last year and above average by any stretch of imagination, he said.

He also claimed that against hopes of 22 million ton, the wheat production had fallen only to 21.4 million ton.

Talking about credibility of crop figures, he said they were based on over 6,000 samples taken by 1,100 reporters throughout Punjab. The crop reporting section had been working for the last many years. The same system had been successfully working in many other countries of the world, he said.

He said doubts about the crop size had also been fuelled by the food department’s failure to achieve the procurement target of 3.5 million ton. But, this inability could also be attributed to many other factors than the size of the crop. The private sector was in with full vigour and, there was no restriction on wheat movement. Both these factors might have hindered the department’s drive, but the crop was certainly above average, he insisted.

Farmers, however, are of the view that the government’s hopes were overoptimistic from the beginning. The weather played its part, but it was never going to be a bumper crop if farmers’ point of view was something to go by, they claimed. Ibrahim Mughal of the Kisan Board Pakistan said the farmers had always been insisting that the prices of inputs would neutralize many of government’s steps.

He said the government was able to announce the support price of wheat on time, but it utterly failed to check the prices of fertilizer. For example, it cut the DAP price by Rs100 under president’s kisan package, but it was guilty of allowing the price go through the roof, thus neutralizing the benefits of cut in price.

Tractor price went even further up and so did the price of diesel which runs over 70 per cent of tubewells. It also failed to check the prices of electricity.

He said all these factors put together the affected farmers’ economics and forced it to concentrate on other areas. All these factors helped reduced the total yield.

The government was well aware of all these problems of the growers, but it chose to ignore them and kept on insisting on the prospects of a bumper crop to cover up its own failures. Now, the result of this policy was for everyone to see, he said.