June 11, 2006	Sunday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 14, 1427

KARACHI, June 10: The TCP on Saturday rejected all bids for the import of 50,000 tons of refined sugar, saying prices were too high.

“We rejected all the bids in the tender as bid prices were too high,” Asif Zaman Ansari, Chairman of the TCP, told Reuters. “We negotiated with the bidders to bring the prices down but they refused. After that we rejected all the bids.”

The TCP was aiming to buy 50,000 tons of white sugar for July-August shipment and it had issued the tender on June 3. The corporation has yet to decide when it would hold the next tender. TCP has been regularly buying sugar on the international market after a government estimate that Pakistan would need at least one million tons of imports in 2006 to meet domestic demand.

Pakistan's last cane crop was 45m tons, producing 2.6 million tons of sugar, against a domestic demand of 3.9m tons. The gap has forced the country to import refined sugar and pushed up domestic retail prices to an all-time high of Rs40 per kg.

So far the TCP has bought 815,000 tons of refined sugar from worldwide sources through 11 import tenders. The government has instructed the TCP to import at least 200,000 tons of sugar per month.

According to government data, Pakistan imported 1.034 million tons of sugar in the first 10 months of the fiscal year 2005-06 (July-June), compared with 98,677 tons in the same period last year. Most imports come from neighbouring India and Dubai.—Reuters