Summer vegetables have entered the market but low production continues to keep their prices high. Officials say that increase in the area under cultivation of cotton, spring maize and oilseeds — rapeseeds, canola and sunflower — has reduced the land available for cultivation of summer vegetables.

Besides, some growers of summer vegetables of Sindh and Punjab have switched over to other, more profitable pursuits including livestock breeding. This too has affected the output.

Combined production of the summer vegetables gradually fell by about 100,000 tonnes, or 10pc, from over one million tonnes in 2008-09 to 0.9 million tonnes in 2012-13, officials of the Ministry of National Food Security and Research say. They link this fall to a proportional reduction of 10pc in the area under cultivation during this period.

Bottle gourd, ridge gourd, bitter gourd, squash gourd, purslane, pumpkin, eggplants, lady finger, luffa, long melon, arum, beans, lotus root, cucumber, capsicum and tomato are some common summer vegetables, though, some of them are also available in winter.

Costs of various inputs of vegetables vary depending upon the location and size of the farm as well as resourcefulness of the farm owner. Cultivating summer vegetables incur much lesser labour cost for owners of large farms because they can employ workers for a longer period, switching their jobs from crop to crop and occasionally engaging them in other non-farm jobs.

“On the contrary, small farm owners pay a higher cost of labour because normally their labour comes from within their families and when they employ strangers they do it for specific tasks and for a very brief period,” says Hussain Ali, a small vegetable farm owner based in Badin.

Since the bulk of input cost for most crops is on fertiliser the increase in prices of chemical manure in last few years has discouraged farmers from growing such minor crops as vegetables, the return on which remains lower than on key cash crops. Some progressive growers have resolved this issue by resorting to tunnel farming that not only reduces the cost of fertiliser by up to 40 per cent, but is also helpful in obtaining the crop a bit earlier than normal. “Various gourds, for example, you bought in Karachi back in March mostly came from tunnel farms where farmers had sown gourds in January,” said Muhammad Salim, an owner of one such farm in Malir district of Karachi.

Talking to this scribe, he said that producers of summer vegetables in tunnel farms have to keep prices of their produce high for the first one or two seasons to recover part of their capital investment in such farms. “But later on, their main earning hinges on higher yield and better quality of veggies.”

If tunnel farming is promoted under public-private partnership, output of veggies can be dramatically increased. Sindh Board of Investment has already prepared feasibility reports for such joint ventures but officials lament that the private sector’s does not seem to be interested.

They say that provincial revenue and agriculture departments can jointly identify and arrange suitable land for this purpose, adding that all the private sector needs to do is pump in a few million rupees in erecting the tunnel farming infrastructure.

Vegetable dealers at Karachi’s wholesale market say some summer vegetables like bottle gourd, bitter gourd and eggplants which have immense medicinal value, are exported in large volumes. And exporters who maintain quarantine standards of importing countries sell these and some other summer veggies in foreign markets at very attractive rates.

That is one reason why prices of these vegetables remain high in domestic markets and local buyers always get the second grade, not the best quality, of the summer veggies.

Item-wise data on exports of various vegetables are not released by Pakistan Bureau of Statistics but overall data show that exports volumes are down during this fiscal year.

Pakistan generally exports 12-15pc of the total volume of veggies produced in a year but lately traders have focused more on quality and packaging of products than export volumes, that is why forex earnings through veggies’ still remain high.

This should have a rather favourable impact on local prices. But in addition to low production, faulty supply chain management and increase in the cost of transportation in the last few years, have been keeping local prices of summer vegetables high, vegetable dealers say.

As of April 14, most seasonal vegetables were selling for Rs50-100 per kg in retail markets of Karachi even though the officially-fixed prices ranged between Rs20-Rs60 per kg.

Consumer prices of two varieties of eggplants, for example, was fixed at Rs20 and Rs25 per kg for April 14. But a market survey revealed that both varieties were selling at Rs40 and Rs50 per kg respectively. —Mohiuddin Aazim