Wheat shortage in the country is worsening day by day, as the government is now considering to import the wheat to fill the shortage. The prices of wheat have shot up in the past three to four months. The per kilo price has been escalated to Rs 70 in the country.
The crisis originally started in Sindh, which now spread across the country. Opposition, which is blaming the government for the crisis stating that government lacks capacity to deal with ongoing crisis.
Initially, the crisis which first originated in Sindh province due to corruption investigations against officials, the provincial government discouraged the procurement of the wheat. The government soon started running out of wheat, which would have surplus wheat, if the procurement went smoothly. Now, the remaining stock is as low as 0.2 million tons.
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Opposition, besides the fact that wheat procurement is a provincial domain, is blaming the Federal government for the issue. In the past fiscal year, the wheat production was projected at 25.195 million tons, but achieved 24.7 million tons. However, on a monthly average, wheat consumption rise up 2 million tons.
Other provinces, especially Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh started relying on Punjab for wheat procurement. Punjab, which possesses extra stockpiles of wheat, has placed a ban on interprovincial movement of wheat.
Moreover, the government also imposed a ban on the export of wheat. But, the export of food commodities was still going on to Afghanistan, on top of it the flour mills, profiteers and hoarders started availing the opportunity form the ongoing crisis to stockpile wheat illegally to meddle with the prices, resulting in artificial increase in prices.
However, the next two months are important as the next crop would start coming in at the end of March. The export from allowed target of 200,000 to 400,000 tons have actually exceeded to 640,000 plus tons, which further contributed to the crisis.
The procurement crisis was originally started in Sindh, which according to the government is a chapter of province to acquire and procure wheat. The outburst damagingly impacted other provinces following Sindh.
