Wheat sowing areas expand on timely harvesting

ISLAMABAD: Wheat acreages in the country’s two key agriculture provinces: Punjab and Sindh increased as farmers timely harvested sugarcane and other crops to make land available for the cash crop sowing, officials said on Monday.

Imtiaz Ahmad Gopnag, food security commissioner in the Ministry of National Food Security and Research, told APP that wheat cultivation in the Punjab – the country’s major wheat producer – rose 0.6 percent to 6.677 million hectares in the current Rabi crop season as compared to the last year, while in Sindh the crop has been cultivated over 1.157 million hectares, up 0.2 percent year-on-year. 

Sindh agriculture department set a wheat acreage target of 1.150 million hectares for the current rabi season. Even last year, the area under wheat crop slightly exceeded 1.154 million hectares against the target of 1.150 million. 

Wheat sowing in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, however, declined 22 percent and five percent to 597,000 hectares and 362,000 hectares, respectively. “Final figures are yet to come from Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” Gopnag said. 

He said the downward trend in both the provinces were mainly due to long prevailing dry weather spell, which created drought like situation and reduced the area under wheat crop in rain-fed areas of the country.

“Rain-fed areas are very low as compared to irrigated areas and contributed only
10 percent of the total crop output in the country,” he added. “Recent rains would bring about positive impact on the crop and growth of wheat plant would gain momentum.”

Wheat cultivation areas across the country were, initially, estimated at more than 8.793 million hectares.

The Federal Committee on Agriculture set a wheat output target of more than
26 million tonnes for the current Rabi season (2016/17).

The country produced 25.4 million tonnes in 2015/16 against the earlier target of 25.8 million tonnes.

The US Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service forecast Pakistan’s wheat output for 2016/17 at 25.3 million tonnes, marginally higher from last year’s revised production.

The Punjab is expected to have carryover stocks of 2.5 million tonnes for the 2016-17 season. Sources said the provincial government is expected to soon float an international tender for the sale of wheat stocks.

The federal government announced $120/tonne rebate for export of wheat. Afghanistan is the country’s sole export market, taking 600,000 tonnes of wheat (in the form of flour).