Punjab's wheat worries.

The Punjab wheat worries have a bad habit of not only renewing themselves periodically but getting complex as well. With the early release of official wheat eating up to 20 per cent of stock even when the historical start time of release season is still more than a month away, it is time for the government to recalculate its earlier calculated risks and also assess emerging ones. The Food Department is doing exactly that.

Its earlier calculations were: Punjab had procured 4.5 million tonnes of wheat this year, with a carry-over of 700,000 tonnes - thus arriving at a total of 5.2m tonnes. It added 1m tonnes to its earlier target of 3.5m tonnes as additional security for the year at a time when imports are expected to be costly, as well as with procedural hiccups because of the war in the Black Sea region that meets 80pc of Pakistan's requirements. So, a million tonnes addition was made as insurance for the year.

Its yearly calculations concluded that it needs 6m tonnes to safely sail through the season, thus facing a deficit of 0.8m tonnes for which it placed a demand for a million-tonne share of imported wheat.

Before that, Punjab tried to convince the Pakistan Agriculture Services and Storage Corporation (Passco) to sell one million tonnes of its local stocks: it thought that the local supply would not have quality issues like the imported commodity and would also be time- and cost-effective. The latest agreement, as revealed by the Food Department officials, is that Passco will provide half a million tonnes of imported and half local wheat.

The complexity of sufficient procurement continues with the early release of the staple in Punjab and the four different prices at which it can be bought

However, these calculations went askew when the new Punjab government, which took over on April 30, ordered the immediate and subsidised release of wheat. The millers normally grind private purchases for the first four months before knocking on official doors in September.

With official releases starting in mid-May this year at a rate of 16,000 tonnes a day (or roughly 425,000 a month), the first three months have so far cost the Food Department around 1.2m tonnes - denuding it of the advantage it secured with one million tonnes of additional purchase. The department is now holding 4m tonnes and has nine full months to go before the next crop hits the market.

These nine months would also be increasingly drier ones, pushing daily releases beyond 25,000...