SANGHAR, April 23: The food department may fail to achieve wheat procurement target of 1.5 million bags in the district as it has purchased only 150,000 bags while 90 per cent of the crop has been harvested.

This was revealed by a survey conducted by this correspondent. A few thousand bags of wheat have been stored at the main godowns in Tando Adam, Shahdadpur and Sinjhoro where hundreds of thousands of wheat bags had been purchased last year.

The Sindh government, as a last effort, has imposed section 144, CrPC, banning wheat movement outside the district of its production, and also increased its price by Rs15 per 100kg bag.

However, most of the wheat produced in Sanghar district has been bought by traders who have shifted it to Karachi and Hyderabad. The general secretary, Small Growers Association, Hassan Askari, Mir Nizamani and other farmers alleged that the food department was just beating about the bush while most the wheat had been bought by traders and consequently hoarded by them or shifted to godowns of flour mills.