ISLAMABAD : Wheat, a major staple food and cash crop of the country, would be cultivated over 8,781.6 thousand hectares of land across crop producing areas of the country during Rabi season 2018-19 in order to produce about 25.572 million tons of grains for fulfilling the domestic requirements as well as to exports. In this regard, all the provinces including Gilgit Baltistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir had been assigned a task to ensure the availability of all inputs in order to achieve areas and production targets fixed for the current sowing season, a senior official in the Ministry of National Food Security and Research Tuesday said. Talking to APP, he said, in Punjab, wheat crop to be cultivated over 6,474.9 thousand hectares as against the 6,637.0 thousand hectares fixed for the last year, adding that the crop production targets were fixed at 19.500 million tons during current season as compared targets of 20.00 million tons fixed during the last season.
Meanwhile, the production targets for Sindh was fixed at 3.800 million tons by cultivating the crop over an 1,150 thousand hectares and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa wheat crop would be cultivated over 756.7 thousand hectares to produce 1.362 million tons as compared the area of 757.6 thousand hectares of same period of last year, he added.
He further informed that wheat crop would be cultivated over 400 thousand hectares as against the same area of last year to produce about 900,000 metric tons of the commodity during Rabi season 2018-19.
He said country had harvested bumper wheat crop during last season, despite that the sowing had witnessed 1.8 percent decrease in the area under wheat production, adding that wheat production was increased by 3.67 percent as compared the same period of last year.
It is worth mentioning here that wheat exports from the country had registered tremendous increase as during last three months of current financial year about 437,832 metric tons of wheat valuing US$ 92.781 million were exported as compared the exports of 173 metric tons costing US$ 1.555 million of same period of last year.