April 4, 2012

 

 

About 220 centres in 11 zones across Pakistan have been established by Pakistan Agriculture Storage and Services Corporation (PASSCO) to start its wheat procurement campaign for the year 2012-13.

 

All the logistic arrangements have been finalised to procure about 1.5 million tonnes of wheat to fulfil the domestic requirements as well as keeping the strategic stocks and export, said General Manager PASSCO, Col. Tanveer.

 

According to Plus News on Tuesday (Apr 3), he said so far government has not fixed any targets of wheat procurement, however the corporation has decided to procure 1.5 million tonnes of the commodity.

 

The corporation has divided the country in 11 zones and established 220 centres, adding that Punjab was divided into nine zones, while Sindh and Balochistan both are considered as single zone separately.

 

For the wheat procurement operation 2012-13, he said PASSCO has arranged 15 million jot bags for the growers to facilitating them to sell their out-put 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 for the growers having less than 10 acre land without further inquiry to sell their produces.

 

GM PASSCO informed that about 1.4 million tonnes 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 tonnes wheat stocks were also with the corporation from the last years' crop out of which Iran will purchase about one million tonnes 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 tonnes 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 tonnes, in Sindh 2.5 million acre against the fixed targets of 2.7 million acre to get out-put of 3.2 million tonnes.

 

In Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa wheat was cultivated over 0.6 million acres and 1.78 million acre respectively as against the set targets of 0.8 and 1.5 million acre respectively, while the crop output was fixed at 0.8 million and sown over 1.5 million tonnes for the period under review. The total wheat out-put across the globe is expected to remain 665-670 million tonnes as against it consumption of 680 million tonnes globally.