ISLAMABAD - Abundant wheat stocks of 4.336 million tonnes are available to cater domestic requirement, besides maintaining smooth demand, supply in local markets and ensure provision of flour and other by-products on sustainable rates across the country.
Domestic wheat stocks during first week of last year (2021) were recorded at about 3.188 million tonnes with carry forward stocks of 731,033 metric tonnes, said Food Security Commissioner Dr Imtiaz Ali Gopang. Talking to APP here, he said that public stock was sufficient to cater the civic requirement of 108 releasing days or 4.34 months upto May 20, 2022. He said that by January 10, 2022 about 2,860,081 metric tons of wheat has been released to flour mills in order to ensure supply of flour at sustainable rates in local markets.
Food Security Commissioner further informed that Punjab province and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had started their releases from September 24, 2021, whereas Sindh province started its releases for flour mills from October 17, 2021.
Meanwhile, 1,356,617 metric tons of imported wheat has also arrived, which would help in augmenting the local wheat stocks and discourage any possibility of hording and profiteering in the country, he added. Besides, he said that wheat sowing during current season had also witnessed positive growth as government announced minimum support price well in time, adding that sowing targets set for the season were achieved by 97%. Out of the set target of 23.327 million acres, the wheat sowing has been completed over 22.766 million, which was recorded at 22.716 million acres during same period last year.
He informed that Punjab province had voluntarily enhanced its target to 16.779 million acres from the assigned sowing target of 16.210 mill acres, adding that with this increase, the overall target of wheat sowing has been enhanced to 23.327 million acres from the previous target of 22.758 million acres as was fixed during the meeting of Federal Committee on Agriculture.
According to Provincial Crop Reporting Services, wheat sowing was still in progress in many rain fed areas and it was expected to further strengthen the overall sowing figures , adding that Punjab has completed crop cultivation over 100% area set for current season. However, other provinces including Sindh had completed wheat cultivation over 97.81%, KP 87.01% and Balochistan over 84.77%.
Meanwhile, Chairman of Pakistan Agriculture Research Council (PARC) Dr Ghulam Muhammad Ali Saturday said that the Council was making coordinated efforts at national and provincial levels, besides strengthening its linkages with international development partners and development agencies for bring local agriculture sector at par with international standards to achieve self-sufficiency in food production and economic development of the country. He said that research based solutions, technological advancement were inevitable to overcome the challenges confronted by national agriculture sector for maintaining food safety and security, besides achieving sustainable long-term economic growth and social prosperity in the country.
Briefing the media persons at National Agriculture Research Center, he said that climate change was the biggest challenge for agriculture and livestock sectors in the country, adding that unsustainable use of natural resources, high cost of inputs, rapid urbanization and high growth in population were among the other looming issues. He said that to overcome all these issues and challenges, a national agriculture research system was developed to provide research based solutions to farming communities as according to their ecological requirements, adding that areas were also identified for the production of high value crops and maximization of farm income.
Under this system, he said that vast areas were identified in four provinces including northern areas and Azad Kashmir for production of high-value crops including oil seeds, citrus and nuts, adding that the implementation of the initiative would help to promote high value crop production as against the production of conventional crops. Dr Ali told that PARC has also started work on new technologies for developing new varieties of high-yielding seeds of major and minor crop in order to enhance per-acre crop out to tackle with the growing demand of food as well as for exporting to develop the economy on sound basis.
So far, the PARC had developed over 65 varieties of different major and minor crops including the development of 08 hybrids of different crops and disseminated among the growers, he said, adding that due to these efforts Pakistan was now producing surplus output in major crops like wheat, rice, sugarcane and maize.
The PARC is also introducing four new seed varieties of long and extra long grain rice to enhance per-acre crop output and farm income, particularly the income of medium and small farmers, he said, adding that development of new verities would help in yielding about 80-120 maunds of rice per-acre as against the conventional verities, which was providing 40 to 50 maunds per-acre. These high-yielding seed varieties were cultivated over three different locations on test and trail basis and initial results of uniform yield trails were showing encouraging trends while in some locations the output crossed 105 mounds per-acre, he added.