QUETTA: The chairman of the Pakistan Flour Mills Association’s Balochistan chapter, Syed Nasir Agha, has warned that prices of wheat and its flour will further increase in the province if timely steps are not taken to overcome the acute shortage of wheat in Balochistan.

Speaking at a press conference here on Wednesday along with Badaruddin Kakar and Asmatullah Kakar, Balochistan chapter representatives of the association, Mr Nasir said that the province was facing acute shortage of wheat which had pushed up prices of wheat and its flour in the province and wheat flour was not easily available to the people.

He said that Provincial Minister Zamarak Khan Piralizai had visited Lahore a few months ago and discussed the wheat shortage issue in Balochistan with leaders of the Punjab government and a request was made to the Punjab government to provide at least 600,000 wheat bags to Balochistan to end the shortage of wheat and its flour in the province.

Mr Nasir said that Punjab

Chief Minister Parvez Elahi had agreed to supply wheat to Balochistan, but so far Balochistan had not received the Punjab government promised wheat.

Mr Nasir said that wheat stock in Balochistan was about to end and only the private sector had some wheat stock which was also about to be finished soon.

He said that at present Balochistan was the only province which had been experiencing serious wheat shortage.

He said if the Punjab government did not provide wheat to Balochistan, the province would experience the worst shortage of the commodity in the coming days.

Mr Nasir said that Pakistan Agricultural Storage and Services Corporation (Passco) gave a subsidy of Rs7 to Rs8 billion to Gilgit-Baltistan for wheat, but the organisation was not ready to provide the same facility to Balochistan. He said the Flour Mills Association of Balochistan region had protested four months ago over the issue, but no step had been taken so far to resolve the matter.

He said the government provided wheat in huge quantity to flour mills, adding that at present the price of wheat was the highest in the country and it would further go up if the federal government did not intervene to control the situation.

Published in Dawn, December 29th, 2022