Industry urges govt to allow export of 2m tons of sugar

Delay in shipments hinders payments to sugarcane farmers

MARDAN: The government should allow export of two million tons of surplus sugar to enable the millers to pay farmers for their produce on time, which will also benefit the government in terms of taxes and revenues.

Pakistan Sugar Mills Association provincial chairman Abdul Qadir Khattak stated this while talking to The Express Tribune on Monday.

“We have asked the government to permit export of surplus sugar, but it has not yet heeded the call, which has resulted in low production of sugarcane and delay in payments by the mills,” Khattak said.

For the past two years, members of the association had been producing two million tons of surplus sugar and expected that one million ton more may be added to the production level in the current season, he said.

Khattak decried that in the last two crushing seasons, Sindh and Punjab had offered a subsidy of Rs5 per kg on the export of surplus sugar, but the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) government, despite promises to the Economic Coordination Committee, did not pay any subsidy.

He asked K-P Chief Minister Pervez Khattak to play his role in the export of surplus commodity for the benefit of sugarcane farmers.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 20^th, 2017.

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