LAHORE, May 30: The inter-district ban on movement of flour will be effective from Monday midnight and will be kept in place as long as it takes the Punjab to achieve wheat procurement target of 3.5 million tons.

According to officials of the Punjab Food Department, the ban has been placed on the demand of the NWFP. In a meeting on May 18, the chief minister of the NWFP had accused the Punjab of keeping a ban on wheat and running its flour mills at the cost of mills of the other province.

The officials said that the mills from the Punjab were grinding wheat and sending it to the NWFP where flour price was bit higher. They said this had created wheat demand in the Punjab and kept its price high. An effective ban will bring the price of wheat further down, they hoped.

At present, the price is not very high, they claimed and added: "It is hovering between Rs365 and Rs370 per 40 kg in most parts of the province. But, it is still slightly higher than the support price announced by the federal government. The ban will further bring it down by slashing the wheat demand."

Once the ban is effective, daily grinding of the mills will come down to 30 per cent of their present capacity, they said. It will naturally reduce the wheat demand correspondingly and ease the market, they said.

Talking about the effectiveness of the ban, the officials were of the view that it was hard to claim 100 per cent success. Leakage is always a possibility rather probability, they said, adding the department certainly had a mechanism to achieve 70 to 80 per cent results.

For making the ban commercially viable for the government, they said it had been placed on districts and a mechanism to enforce it would be established at all big divisional headquarters.

Talking about the wheat procurement drive, they claimed that the department had touched a figure of 2.2 million tons. Arrival of crop has slowed down to 10,000 to 12,000 tons a day, they said.

This is happening because of the crackdown, they claimed. They said wheat thrashing had almost completed and now new arrivals at the market were not expected. They said the crackdown would help the department cross a figure of three million tons.

The officials feared that the farmers, who were storing their crop to get better profits, might end up losing it. They said the growers did not have the capacity, training or a mechanism to store wheat.

They are doing it on their own or on the direction of private sector, they said. Farmers, who used to keep not more than 10 to 15 bags, are now stocking 100 to 150 bags of 100kg, they said, adding it was feared that untimely rains might damage the crop as it was not properly fumigated and stored.

They said the department had sought the help of revenue officers to convince the growers to sell their crop. Farmers are to be told that the ban on movement of wheat and flour will not be lifted unless the department achieves its target which is still far off, they said.

Meanwhile, the NWFP started lifting wheat from the Punjab from Saturday and the process was gathering pace. The Punjab had promised the NWFP on May 18 300,000 tons of wheat during the next two months for easing pressures. But, Balochistan had not yet started lifting wheat reserved for it. It was supposed to get 30,000 tons of wheat during the next two months.