TOBA TEK SINGH: Despite a bumper kinno yield this season in the district, which is known as second major citrus producer after Sargodha, traders are ‘facing losses’.

During a survey this correspondent learnt that most of the trees in kinno orchards are full of produce but the traders, who have got orchards on lease from farmers at least three months ago, claim their trade so far has not been encouraging.

Like Sargodha, bulk of the produce here is traditionally sent to Iran and Russia via Quetta.

Muhammad Asghar, a kinno trader, says the fare of a Quetta-bound truck loaded with 900 crates (of 100 kinnos each) is Rs40,000. They spend Rs100 on each crate (its manufacturing and picking of fruit from the orchard). He says since a truck is sold in Quetta for Rs225,000, they are sustaining losses.

Asghar says Toba Tek Singh orchards did not face virus attack this year unlike Sargodha. “This is the reason buyers in Quetta are offering less rate because of virus-hit crop fear.”

He says the trade is viable when a truck of 900 crates is sold in Quetta for Rs300,000. Traders had faced such a situation in 2011 and 2012 as well and suffered huge losses.

An orchard farmer, Mian Muhammad Manzoor, of Chak 343 GB Jarahan, who has 100 acres of kinno orchard, says during the last couple of years farmers faced losses as kinno traders ‘fled’ without paying the money settled with them. They even did not pick the entire fruit.

When contacted, a Quetta’s Hazar Ganji fruit market commission agent Muhammad Ismail Khan says the price of kinno can increase if the citrus is exported to Iran and Russia. According to Ismail Khan, export to both the countries has been suspended for the last one year and presently it is being sent to Aghanistan only where its consumption is low.

He says a crate of kinno is exported to Afghanistan against Rs300 only, resulting in loss to traders.

“We may face trouble, like in the past two years, in recovering our advance money we have paid to the traders of kinno orchards in Punjab several months before the start of production with the hope that in case of flourishing export they will surely supply trucks to us but they will disappear otherwise,” Khan says.