PESHAWAR, Sept 2: The NWFP government is finding it difficult to cope up with the rising demand for wheat from flour mills which were expecting to come out of a four-month-long closure after the provincial food directorate started wheat disbursement on from Sept 1.

"The situation is undermining efforts of the NWFP flour mills industry to come out of recession it went through during the last four months," a spokesman for the NWFP Pakistan Flour Mills Association (PFMA) said when contacted.

Disbursement of wheat from the provincial government's storage centres to flour mills started on Wednesday last in several parts of the province in line with the federal government's policy of providing fixed quantity of wheat to every mill from the official godowns between Sept 1 and April 30 every year.

The renewed disbursement operations have come as a fresh lifeline for the NWFP's flour mills after a majority of the mills experienced closure because of the ban imposed four months ago by the Punjab government on the transportation of wheat from its area of jurisdiction to other parts of the country.

Business circles say that though the provision of wheat from official godowns enabled dozens of flours mills to restart their operations, the government has not been able to feed sufficient quantity of wheat to all mills across the province.

The province has in all 260 flour mills of which some 160 are operational and the rest have been closed down because of the wheat shortage. Business circles said that the quantity of wheat released during the last two days from official godowns situated at the district level had reflected that the government did not have sufficient wheat reserves.

"Even in some of the districts supply of wheat has yet to be started," PFMA's spokesman said. He said the Directorate of Food, NWFP, had underlined a cumbersome process meant to supply wheat to flour mills after verifying their status - whether they were functional or not.

"Only operational mills would be provided with wheat from the government's stocks," said a deputy director of the food directorate. However, business circles said that the quantity of wheat being supplied from the official godowns was not enough to help flour mills to work at full swing.

The provincial government, said the sources, had a total of less than 100,000 tons in its stocks. In this way, disbursement of greater releases was not possible for the government till the time fresh consignments of wheat reached their designated places in the NWFP.

The food directorate official said that 100,000 tons of wheat being procured through PASSCO from Punjab would shortly be transported to the NWFP. Similarly, the province would get 300,000 tons of wheat from one million wheat being imported to meet wheat consumption requirements of Sindh, Balochistan and the NWFP.

"First of the ships is likely to reach Karachi on Sept 13 or 14 following which it would take a couple of weeks to transport part of wheat to different areas of the NWFP," said a deputy director of the food directorate.

However, he said that, since several of the flour mills in the NWFP had been closed down the government had decided to release wheat from its godowns only after verifying which one of the flour mills were functional.

According to a list prepared by the food directorate, so far, 124 mills in the NWFP and six in Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) have been categorized as "functional mills" and have been issued certificates for procuring wheat from the official godowns against their specific quota.

There are a total of 57 flour mills in the district Peshawar of which only 30 have been categorized as 'functional'. PFMA's spokesman said that each of the flour mills in Peshawar district that had been categorized by the food directorate as 'functional mills' were being provided 40 bags of 100 kilograms every day.