New Delhi, September 4
The government has decided to remove customs duty on import of wheat by private companies to check high retail prices, said the Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar today.
He said the orders for duty-free import of wheat will be passed shortly and this facility will be available for 4-5 months only.
Since June, when the government cut import duty on wheat from 50 per cent to five per cent to allow private companies to supplement its efforts to import 5.5 million tonnes wheat in order to boost buffer stocks following lower than expected crop production, according to official estimates hardly 1.2 million tonnes wheat has so far been imported by traders.
Pawar said plans to import 5.5 million tonnes of wheat through the State Trading Corporation would suffice till the next wheat harvest season beginning mid-April.
He told mediapersons on the sidelines of Aquaculture and Fisheries meeting here adding that the government would bring non-wheat growing areas under the cultivation of wheat in attempt to make the country self-sufficient in the commodity.
For this purpose, wheat cultivation will be extended to Assam,
West Bengal and Orissa besides encouraging Bihar and Jharkhand farmers to grow wheat.
Consequent to poor wheat crop, particularly because of the private trade cornering a bigger share of recent harvest arrived in markets for sale, India had to go into the international market to build up the inventory with state-run Food Corporation of India. And, it has contracted an import of 55 lakh tonnes of which a large portion has already arrived in the country.
Stocks with FCI were estimated at 7.33 million tonnes on August 1, down from 12.9 million tonnes a year ago. Private trade has contracted imports of about 500,000 to 600,000 tonnes, but many firms had been demanding the duties be removed.
State-run State Trading Corporation has contracted imports of 3.8 million tonnes of wheat since March. Last week, it floated a fresh tender for 1.67 million tonnes.
Pawar reiterated that the government would not have to import more wheat as the country has a bumper rice crop and going to have a good wheat crop in coming Rabi season with good monsoon rainfall.
Meanwhile, India has underlined the need for Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations to formulate suitable approaches to conduct risk analysis in aquaculture applicable to the situation in a particular country.
Inaugurating the FAO Sub-Committee Meeting on Aquaculture here, he said the potential and real impacts of introducing new species into the aquatic eco-systems have been subjects of major debates worldwide.
''It is important to have feasible guidelines for the import of new species of fish and their strains keeping in view the bio-security aspects of aquaculture. It will be desirable to have simplified procedure of risk analysis process, as risk analysis for pathogens of aquatic animal is a relatively new field for most of the countries,'' Pawar said.
The global production of fish from capture fisheries and aquaculture was about 101 million tonnes of food fish in 2002 and the total amount of fish available for human consumption increased to 103 million tonnes in 2003 mainly on account of aquaculture production.
