Rising flour price

Prices of flour in Sindh province have been raised by another two rupees per kilogram. And with that, flour number 2.5 is now being sold for Rs44.50 per kilogram while fine quality flour for Rs47.50 per kilogram. What’s striking is that this is the third hike in the flour price just this month. Moreover, the price of the commodity has gone up by as much as Rs11 since April.

The chief of the provincial body of the Pakistan Flour Mills Association (Pfma) has warned that the market now only has wheat stocks to last until the middle of October, after which fresh supplies from the state granaries will be needed to meet the demand. The good news, however, is that senior officials of the Sindh Food Department are cognizant of the issue and claim to have approached the Pakistan Agricultural Storage and Services Corporation (Passco) twice for releasing as much as 500,000 tonnes of wheat to Sindh in the coming months to overcome any flour and wheat crisis.

There may be people here who are content buying flatbread from the market or may not otherwise feel the pinch of a Rs11 hike in the price of flour – accumulated to more than Rs100 for a 10-kilogram bag. But for many other residents, particularly the 55 million who live on less than two dollars a day, the Rs2/kg hike in the price of flour or the Rs5 rise in the price of a flatbread piece means a lot. People at or even near the bottom rung of the ladder live on meager, day-to-day incomes where the room to accommodate inflationary pressures is extremely limited.

Such people are already bearing the brunt of a double-digit inflation — which is at its highest over the past five and a half years. Street protests over the prices of essentials spare no one, and even Prime Minister Imran Khan’s good intentions of wanting to stabilise prices of essential commodities may not be much helpful. More needs to be done to prevent the camel’s back from breaking.