LAHORE, June 1: Conceding for the first time that the country may barely meet its food requirement from this year’s wheat production and that there will be no exportable surplus, the federal government has moved to sort out reasons for the ‘debacle’.
The Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock has invited all stakeholders at the provincial level to ascertain the causes behind the low production and decreasing per acre yield.
According to an employee of the ministry: “The ministry is in a state of shock. All its targets seem to have come crashing down. On Oct 7, 2002, at the beginning of the season, it set a target of 19.754 million tons, which was revised to 20.63 million tons on March 8, 2003, immediately after the mid-February rains. The per hectare yield was also revised from 2,445 tons to 2,557. But, now it is feared that all these targets might be missed by a big margin.”
An official of the federal wheat commissioner’s office said: “The recently submitted revised estimates, very moderate in every sense of the word, seem too optimistic now. The ministry has asked the province to re-calculate its earlier estimates. The Punjab was supposed to produce 15.4 million tons, Sindh 2.1 million, NWFP 1.1 million and Baluchistan 0.64 million tons, giving the country a total of 19.25 million tons of wheat. However, it is now feared that even this figure might be missed by half a million tons, leaving the country with barely enough wheat for its own requirements and no exportable surplus.”
At one such meeting in Lahore on May 28, which was attended by the managing director of Punjab Seed Corporation, the coordinator of National Agriculture Research Council, the director of Crop Reporting Cell and representatives of the ministry and the Pakistan Agriculture Research Council, major factors in the crisis were identified as small size of the grain, poor use of technology, widely fluctuating temperatures during the crucial booting stage of the crop, progressive loss of vigour of the Inqilab-91 variety of wheat that is overwhelmingly used in the Punjab, heterogeneous growth of crop, prolonged weed attack —- mainly caused by mild weather and imbalanced use of fertilizers.
According to Mohammad Idrees of the Farmers Associates Pakistan, the total production might fall somewhere between 19 and 19.5 million tons. That means that the country will not have to import wheat this year, but it would certainly be vulnerable next year to an unexpected fall in production and the resultant need for import. The government must move at the policy level to attract farmers into growing more wheat.”
About the government policy, the adviser to the Punjab chief minister on agriculture, Jehangir Tareen, maintained that realization of the problem was there, and the government was considering different policy options, one of which was to start the sowing season earlier. Late sowing has hurt the crop this year, so have weeds. These areas are being looked into very deeply. The government is conducting studies under the annual development programme and may come up with policy options shortly. All the policies that can have a direct impact on production would be thoroughly studied and executed, he said.
