Severe Wheat Crisis Looms in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as Official Godowns Hold Only Two Weeks’ Stock Amid Deep Annual Deficit
PESHAWAR: A crisis of wheat and flour has been already setting in on the province of KP, as official government godowns at all over the province are holding only two weeks’ worth of food stocks.
As per the official documents available with the Food Department, the provincial stocks are just 189,000 MT of wheat at present. The province needs around 14,900 tons of cement each day, so the remaining stock will be depleted in around 2 weeks.
Staggering Annual Deficit and Population Demands
The official wheat dossier indicates that in order to feed the total population of KP of 43,843,000, it would need a huge of 5.436 million MT of wheat annually.
The annual production gap is enormous due to the fact that the province suffers from a gap of 3.964 million metric tons as the native agricultural production is only 1.472 million metric tons.
The Food Department issues an alert after PASSCO supplies are still outstanding.
The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Food Department has officially raised an alarm on the looming danger of food crisis in the province. But administrative relief is still pending as the supply of 225,000 metric tons of wheat requested by the Pakistan Agricultural Storage and Services Corporation (PASSCO) is still stuck in the bureaucratic red tape.