DADU, April 5: The Sindh food secretary has warned that traders who purchased wheat without licence and flour mill owners who stored more than 250 maunds of wheat will be arrested and cases will be lodged against them.

Talking to journalists here on Monday, Mir Mohammad Parhiar said that directives had been issued to district food controllers to start checking of licences and wheat stocks in flour mills.

He said that the province faced flour crisis as the wheat production target could not be achieved last year.The secretary said that in 2002-3, the wheat procurement target had been fixed at 500,000 metric tons for Sindh but food officials had purchased only 325,000 metric tons.

He said that now the procurement target was 600,000 metric tons for the province. He said that the food department had purchased 10,000 tons of wheat from March 1 to April 5. He said that 200 wheat procurement centres had been established in Sindh to achieve the target by the end of June.

Mr Parhiar claimed that wheat prices in the market would fall in a week if growers stopped to sell wheat to traders without licences. He said that earlier loading charges of Rs2 to Rs5 per bag were recovered from growers but now the food department was paying the charges to contractors.

He said that the food department contractors were also now loading wheat from farms while earlier growers had to take wheat to procurement centres. He said that 20 food officials had been suspended from October 2003 to April 2004 on charges of irregularities.

He said that inquiries had been initiated against food officials of the Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Mirpurkhas, Larkana, Dadu, Nawabshah, Naushahro Feroze and Khairpur districts who had allegedly sold out thousands of bags of wheat to traders and maintained false records. He said that now there was no shortage of wheat in Karachi, Hyderabad and other main cities of the province.

Later, the food secretary visited Jhangara, Bajara, Khanpur and Khairpur Nathan Shah wheat procurement centres and found one assistant food controller and five food inspectors absent from their duties. He suspended the assistant food controller and issued show-cause notices to the food inspectors.