ISLAMABAD, Jan 16: Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) spokesman Farhatullah Khan Babar has said the food crisis will not be resolved by deploying Rangers at flour mills but by exposing the manipulators and retrieving the wheat hoarded by them.

In a statement issued here on Wednesday, the PPP spokesman said the party was gravely concerned over the wheat situation in the country, and demanded that the regime came clean on reports of hoarding, smuggling and manipulation of stock by vested interests behind the current crisis.

Mr Babar said at a time when food riots were feared, the claims by the regime that flour prices in Pakistan were lower than in regional countries was adding insult to injury.

The regime, he said, had claimed bumper crop of 23.5 million tons and allowed export but was now importing 1.5 million tons costing over $500 million to the national exchequer.

“Either the claims of a bumper crop were false and designed to justify wheat exports when export should have not been permitted or, if the claims were correct, the wheat stock has been hoarded somewhere and the current crisis is artificial,” he added.

Mr Babar recalled that in the days of the PPP government the premises of the hoarders were raided and stocks of more than 500,000 tons of wheat recovered. However, neither the Shaukat Aziz government nor the present caretakers had the will and courage to raid the premises and recover hoarded stocks, he said.

QURAN KHAWANI: Naheed Khan, the political secretary to slain PPP chairperson Benazir Bhutto, held Quran Khawani for the deceased at her residence here on Wednesday.