ISLAMABAD, Jan 30: Haunted by its limited mandate, the Federal Food Committee (FFC) on Wednesday directed the provincial governments to immediately start a crackdown on hoarders and smugglers of wheat flour if they wanted to avert a crisis of other food items in coming days.

Lack of inter-provincial coordination for national food security and the fact that smuggling of wheat and flour was almost non-stoppable and other related issues were discussed at a high-level meeting held here between the FFC and the food secretaries of the provinces, insiders said.

The chief secretaries of Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan and representatives of the Pakistan Flour Mills Association, Rangers, Frontier Constabulary, Utility Stores and the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock also attended the meeting.

The meeting, which was expected to come up with a joint line of action for controlling the flour crisis and averting shortages of other essential food items in coming days, remained inconclusive amid hurling of blames and exchange of allegations.

The FFC Chairman, Lt-Gen (retd) Farooq Ahmed Khan, who presided over the meeting, had to postpone a scheduled media briefing apparently because he had no good news to offer to the media.

Sources told Dawn that the FFC was in the process of preparing a report on the flour crisis and giving a final shape to its recommendations. The report would be submitted to President Pervez Musharraf and caretaker Prime Minister Mohammedmian Soomro. The complete “overhauling” of the provincial food departments would be on the top of FFC’s demand list.

The report, analysts here said, might likely to ignite ‘a war of interests’ between the provincial bureaucracy and the FFC constituted by the president on Jan 12 to ensure the national food security.

Insiders said the FFC chairman was not happy over the way flour hoarders were being dealt with even after their arrests. During the flour crisis, about 10,000 flour bags were seized from an Islamabad-based flour mill. The authorities had lodged a case against the mill owner, but he got away by just paying a fine of Rs10,000 imposed on him by a local court.

The sources said similar cases had been registered against a number of mills in various parts of the country. But, its seems that no one is being punished for causing a crisis that is believed to have made the people pay billions of rupees extra on buying flour over two and a half months.

The sources said that none of the food secretaries or the chief secretaries was willing to own the responsibility for the flour crisis in his area. “This was a vital but not a fruitful meeting,” a participant told Dawn.

In fact, flour is still being smuggled despite the deployment of Frontier Constabulary in the NWFP and Balochistan and Rangers in Punjab and Sindh. Mills are not picking over 9,000 tons of extra daily quota of wheat resulting in the stagnation of supply and prices remaining high.

An official press release said the chief secretaries had presented an overview of the flour situation in their provinces. The meeting stressed the need for improvement of food departments in all the provinces. The participants agreed that each province should stock strategic reserves of wheat in their control.

A mechanism for inter-provincial transportation of wheat should be devised to check smuggling. The NWFP and Sindh were asked to adopt the practice of the daily issue of wheat to flour mills.