KARACHI: Floods in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province have destroyed 30 percent of the country’s wheat stocks, a senior official of a leading business forum said this week, as a prominent trader advised the government to allow imports of the commodity to stabilize prices.
Large swathes of crops have been destroyed in Pakistan’s Punjab since late August, where floods have killed 46, affected 3.9 million and displaced 1.8 million. Deluges have damaged fields of rice, maize, cotton, sugarcane, vegetables and damaged wheat storages in the breadbasket province, triggering fears of shortages and increase in food prices.
Pakistan was ranked as the world’s eighth-largest wheat producer by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) last year. It said the country had produced 31.4 million tons of the crop that year, which amounted to 4 percent of the world’s total wheat production.
“Our assessment (is that) 30 percent of wheat stock is gone,” the Pakistan Business Forum’s (PBF) Chief Organizer Ahmad Jawad told Arab News on Thursday.
The PBF is a prominent organization that represents and supports the business community of Pakistan. It is a part of the International Business Forum (IBF), a platform comprising 42 business associations from nearly 25 countries.
