The Sensitive Price Index shows a 5.03 percent increase year-on-year over the prices last year. The SPI has gone up for 12 consecutive weeks now, with the present increase being 0.22 percent more than last week’s level. There has been an increase in the prices of tomatoes, onions and potatoes, which is a clear indication of the floods having created this, though the effect has probably been increased by the closure of the border with Afghanistan. Then there has been the increase in the price of sugar, which is now retailing at between Rs 180 and Rs 200 per kg. However, with the floods it is apparently a case of winning on the swings what one has lost on the roundabouts, because they have allowed higher targets to be set for Rabi crops.
This is because the storages have been filled by the rains, and the provinces have been allocated 33.814 million acre feet for the coming Rabi. Also factored in is the fact that a support price of Rs 3500 per maund has been set by the Punjab, in a reversal of the previous decision abolishing the support price. As a result, the Federal Committee on Agriculture set a wheat production target of 29.68 million tons, roughly the same as achieved last year, but less than the record of 31.6 million tons, achieved the year before that. Committee also set targets for gram, potato, onion and tomato crops, against high but not record levels.
The effects of the floods were visible not so much in the yields of kharif crops, as in the areas sowed. While rice and mungbean registered increases in production of 2.7 percent and 1.2 percent respectively, their cropped area was up 21.9 percent and 22.9 percent respectively. Sugarcane, however, showed an increase of 5.5 percent in area and 5.9 percent in production, indicating an increase in productivity. This indicates that the decision last year to export sugar was basically meant to benefit the millers. The only reason the crops, which includes rice, the country’s secondary staple, produced beyond last year was because of a large increase in cropped area. If the floods had not caused losses, yields would probably have been better. As it is, one of the long-known benefits of flooding is the depositing of silt, which means a renewal of the land.
