ISLAMABAD, Aug 29: The government on Wednesday banned export of wheat flour, maida, suji and baisan through sea and rail routes with immediate effect and provided a list of hoarders to the provincial governments for action in an attempt to arrest rising flour prices.
The export of these items through land route (to Afghanistan) will, however, continue.
The ECC authorised the LPG producers to have complete flexibility and authority in selling LPG at lower prices on commercial consideration in accordance with market situation
These decisions were taken by the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the Cabinet with Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz in the chair.
Dr Ashfaque Hasan Khan, the spokesman for the finance ministry, told reporters: “The ECC took serious notice of the recent increase in the prices of wheat and wheat flour despite a record crop of 23.5 million tons,” which is more than the country’s requirement.
He said the government would start releasing wheat from its 4.7 million tons stocks from Sept 1 to 7 to only functional flour mills at a fixed issue price of Rs460-470 per 40kg. “The government is also providing a list of wheat hoarders to provincial governments for appropriate action against non-mills and non-functional mills who are hoarding wheat for speculative purposes,” he said.
Dr Ashfaque said the federal and provincial mills would also ensure foolproof system to check cross-border smuggling and hoarding of wheat and provincial governments had been directed to ensure that built-in subsidy in the issue price should be passed on to consumers by reducing the price of flour.
Responding to a question, as to how many hoarders have been identified in the list given to the provinces and why the government did not make such names public, he said neither he saw the list nor he knew anything about the names. He, however, added that the list was with the ministry of food, agriculture and livestock.
In another decision, the ECC directed the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (Ogra) to notify producer price of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) on the basis of current month contract price, rather than existing practice of revising producer prices on the basis of previous month’s contract price.
The ECC allowed the LPG producers to have complete flexibility and authority in selling LPG at lower prices on commercial consideration in accordance with market situation. Under the existing rules introduced about a year ago, even the public sector producers are forced to fix higher LPG rate, which hampers market competition to the disadvantage of consumers. Similarly, the export of LPG has been disallowed.
Dr Ashfaque, who is also economic adviser to the finance ministry, said the ECC had also reviewed Ramazan Relief Package which would become effective from Sept 10. He said the utility stores rates would be lower by 16 to 29 per cent than market prices. However, most of the prices he quoted as part of the Ramazan package were already prevailing in the USC outlets. He did not respond when questioned what did the relief package mean when the rates were already applicable on USC outlets. For example, he said, dal chana would be sold at Rs29 per kg, basmati rice at Rs45 per kg and ghee at Rs67 per kg under the relief package.
The adviser said the inflation rate was witnessing a declining trend as consumer price index stood at 6.4 per cent in July compared with 7.6 per cent of July last year.
