ISLAMABAD - Pakistan Agriculture Storage and Services Corporation (PASSCO) has established 220 centres in 11 zones across the country to start its wheat procurement campaign for the year 2012-13.
All the logistic arrangements have been finalized to procure about 1.5 million tons of wheat, said General Manager PASSCO, Col. Tanveer.
Talking to APP here on Tuesday, he said so far government has not fixed any targets of wheat procurement, however the corporation has decided to procure 1.5 million tons of the commodity.
The corporation has divided the country in 11 zones and established 220 centers, adding that Punjab was divided into nine zones, while Sindh and Balochistan both are considered as single zone separately.
For the wheat procurement operations 2012-13, he said PASSCO has arranged 15 million jot bags for the growers to facilitating them to sell their output at official fixed cost.
Col Tanveer further said about eight bags per acre would be provided to the growers on showing the land revenue records to keep transparency during the campaign.
The PASSCO was striving to provide more bags to the growers having less then 10 acre land without further inquiry to sell their produces.
GM PASSCO informed that about 1.4 million tons carry forward stock of the wheat from the crop season 2010 was available which was being sold to the local markets.
He further said that 1.2 million tons wheat stocks were also with the corporation from the last years’ crop out of which Iran will purchase about one million tons with barter trade system.
It may be recalled that wheat crop was set to cultivate over 22.7 million acre across the country to produce 25 million tons to fulfil the domestic consumptions as well as to export.
In Punjab, it was cultivated over 16 million acre as against the set target of 16.95 million acre to produce 19.2 million tons, in Sindh 2.5 million acre against the fixed targets of 2.7 million acre to get output of 3.2 million tons.
In Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa wheat was cultivated on over 0.6 million acre and 1.78 million acre respectively as against the set targets of 0.8 and 1.5 million acre respectively.
In Balochistan and KPK the crop output was fixed at 0.8 million and sown over 1.5 million tons for the period under review.