During the current wheat procurement campaign for 2011-12, food departments of the provinces and Pakistan Agriculture Storage and Services Corporation (PASSCO) have procured about 976,247 tonnes of the commodity against the total procurement targets of 6.57 million tonnes.
Deputy Agriculture Development Commissioner of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MinFA), Imtiaz Ahmad Gopang has said that Food Department Punjab has procured about 175,107 tonnes of wheat till May 1 as against its overall targets of four million tonnes.
“The Punjab province has increased its wheat procurement targets from 3.5 million tonnes to four million tonnes for the year 2011-12”, he added. Meanwhile, he said that Sindh has procured about 798,496 tonnes so far to fulfill domestic requirements.
The ADC said that PASSCO has been given the task to procure 1.3 million tonnes of the commodity adding that it would procure 1.26 million tonnes from Punjab and 0.04 million tonnes from Sindh. PASSCO has started wheat procurement in Punjab where it has procured about 2,644 tonnes of wheat from its 176 procurement centers across the province, he added. Imtiaz Ahmad also noted that PASSCO has established 11 procurement centers in Sindh, 14 centers in Baluchistan for procuring the commodity.
He informed that the provincial government in line with the federal government has devised a strategy to provide 200 bags per farmer at an average of 10 bags per acre for small and medium growers. The large scale farmers having land of more than 50 acres would be provided 500 bags per farmer adding that when these bags would be filled by the growers they would be provided more bags for the grain packing, he added.
It may be recalled that this year wheat crop has been sown over 8.8 million hectares of land in the country to fulfill the domestic consumption which was 3.5 percent less as compared to the last year sowing.
Wheat crop has been sown over 6.68 million hectares of land in Punjab, while in the Sindh Province about 1.08 million hectare of land are under wheat crop,he said. In Khyber Pakhtunkhawa (KPK) the wheat crop was sown over 0.73 million hectares and in Baluchistan it was cultivated over 0.32 million hectare.
Meanwhile, the officials of Ministry of Food and Agriculture informed that current wheat crop outlook was quit satisfactory in the country adding that it is also expected that output of the crop would also surpass the targets. They also expect that a bumper wheat crop was expected in Sindh, where the sowing had surpassed the fixed targets this year.
