MULTAN, Jan 4 The chief minister's adviser on agriculture, MNA Jehangir Tareen, has called a meeting of agriculture department officials and importers of pesticides in Lahore on Monday to discuss the shortage of herbicides.

Sources in the agriculture department said the Director-General of Federal Agriculture Ministry's Plant Protection department, Rashid Basheer Mazari, had also been invited to apprise the meeting of the import of herbicides this year.

It may be added here that the month of January is crucial for getting rid of unnecessary weeds and herbs after the first irrigation of wheat fields. But the herbicides popular among the growers are only being sold at an exorbitant rate on the black market.

The Punjab agriculture department plans to apply herbicides over six million acres this year to get a better wheat yield. The department has also spent precious resources on an extensive print and electronic media campaign to popularize the use of herbicides among growers. However, the supplies available with importers could hardly cover 2.4 million acres.

Sources said the federal agriculture ministry had initiated a move to bring the three most popular wheat herbicides from the restricted category of import-under-brand name list of Form 1 to the category of free-to-import-for-all under the generic name list of Form 16 in order to bridge the demand-supply gap. But the Punjab agriculture department was opposed to the move, which could not materialize therefore.

Growers' bodies complain that a few pesticide firms have a monopolistic control over the supply of popular wheat herbicides, which provides them an opportunity to mint extra money by creating a shortage of their products when they are in demand.

They recall that the problem also arose during the cotton season this year when the economically pernicious American and Army Bollworms were wrecking the prospects of a bumper cotton crop. The required pesticides were only available on the black market.