KARACHI: Flour millers raised the flour price (no 2.5) to Rs1,660 per 50 kg bag from Rs1,620 while wholesale sugar price further crawled up.

The flour millers had already jacked up the prices of flour by at least three times in August. However, they had kept the rate of super fine flour (maida) and fine flour unchanged at Rs1,815 and Rs1,800 respectively.

A miller linked the price hike to persistent increase in 100-kg wheat bag price to Rs3,000 in open market from Rs2,925-2,950 last week. In June this year, wheat bag price was hovering between Rs2,550-2,600.

He said that the Sindh government has also fixed the issue price of wheat bag at Rs2,850 as compared to Rs2,800 fixed by the Punjab government.

He recalled that Sindh’s issue price of wheat had always remained lower than Punjab but this year it was fixed at the higher side. On the impact of fixing issue price on wheat, he said the Sindh government will provide 8,000 bags per month to every mill in Sindh which is insufficient.

He said the increase in wheat bag price was also because of lifting of wheat by the exporters in the last few months which is, however, far low than the last year. He added that some millers are also exporting flour to UAE and Gulf.

According to Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), wheat exports in July-August 2012 remained low at 68,569 tons ($21 million) as compared to 133,414 tons ($41.4 million) in the same period of 2011.

Despite bumper wheat crop, the end users had been paying high price for various flour varieties as traders linked it to high support price of Rs1,050 per 40 per kg as compared to 950.

In sugar, wholesale price climbed to Rs50 per kg from Rs48.70 on October 4 while it was Rs47.70 per kg in the last week of September.

Retailers will push up the rate to Rs53-54 per kg from the current rate of Rs50-52 per kg. However, increase in wholesale rate started going up after the government’s decision of allowing further export of 200,000 tons as against the already permitted 300,000 tons few months back.

Consumers are paying high price despite 5.6 per cent rise in sugar production in 2011-2012 to 4,634,093 tons as compared to 4,168,721 tons in 2010-2011. In July 2012, sugar production stood at 14,391 tons as compared to zero production in July 2011.