KARACHI, Feb 22: The Punjab government is exploring export prospects of its carry-over surplus wheat stocks of more than 1.5 million tons to various countries including India and Turkey.

“Our intention is to obtain the best possible price for our wheat,” Chowdhry Mohammad Iqbal, Punjab’s Food Minister, informed Dawn by telephone from Lahore. “It is not only India or Turkey but any country of the world that will offer us the best price,” he said.

A perpetual wheat import country, Pakistan, will enter again the wheat export market. But Pakistan’s wheat export this year will coincide with the import of about one million tons mainly, a sub-standard wheat variety from Russia for the consumers in Karachi.

In case the Punjab government manages to firm up an export deal for its wheat, it will be the fulfilment of a dream of the former commerce minister Razzak Dawood, who visualized “potatoes for export being loaded from one berth of the Karachi port, and imported potatoes being unloaded at the adjacent berth at the same time”.

“Pakistan enters the era of open market and free economy in which profitability is supreme and the consumer is pushed aside to the periphery to live perpetually in a state of helplessness,” comments a cynic economist.

Sufi Bilal, leader of the India Pakistan flour millers confederation in Lahore, informed Dawn that he was exploring to export half a million ton of Punjab’s wheat to India against a tender floated recently by the Union government.

The Indian government is forced to float a tender for wheat import after its production estimates proved wrong and a staple food shortage is being felt in the southern state of Karnatak and West Indian state of Maharashtra during the period immediately before the harvesting of next crop.

However, he said that the Punjab government was looking for rates somewhere between $180 to 190 a ton as against $165 a ton of wheat imported recently by Pakistan from the USA.

The Punjab government is exploring export prospects of its carryover surplus stocks in anticipation of harvesting a bumper crop—16.5 million tons to 17 million tons—this season. “We will purchase every grain of wheat from the farmer,” the Punjab food minister assured.

The expectation is that the export of carryover surplus wheat stocks will create space for stocking wheat from the new crop and the Punjab government’s initial projection is to lift 2.8 million tons through official procurement. The PASSCO is expected to procure about two million tons.

Sufi Bilal, who had been the Chief of Pakistan Flour Mills Association several times, is of the view that the government should make provision for wheat export when a bumper crop is harvested. “We have a potential of exporting from one to 1.5 million tons,” he said.

Chowdhry Iqbal said that the Punjab is carrying over surplus wheat stocks because there is no demand from the wheat deficit provinces like Sindh and Balochistan.

Pakistan entered the wheat export market for the first time in summer of the year 2001, when about 800,000 tons of wheat was exported. Pakistan had then struck a deal of 100,000 tons with Iraq under the United Nations ‘Oil for Food’ programme at the rate of euro 214 or $196 a ton.

Then in the year 2001, the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the cabinet decided as early as March, when wheat harvesting commences, to export 800,000 tons of wheat to Iran and Afghanistan.

In the following years, however, consumers in Pakistan felt acute shortage of wheat and flour and it touched its peak in October 2003. As bank rates plummeted to lowest level in the history and banks offered loans at four and five per cent, the traders and speculators hoarded the wheat.

The free market economy saw hoarding of all the commodities — wheat, sugar, pulses and even the perishable items like vegetables and since then there has been no respite for the consumers.

In its various reports, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) drew government’s attention towards the misuse of low interest rates and generous bank lending causing shortages and price spiral.