The Truth Behind India's Wheat Stocks
Well, well, well, who'd have thought it eh? Just call me Sherlock and leave it at that.
An Indian TV reporter has stumbled across wheat in Punjab worth 15 crores (a crore is Indian for a bloody big number, 15 of them is around USD3.3 million), in what can only be described as a bit of a state. We're talking a not even fit for the cat kind of a state.
Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, nice lad that he is, has promised to look into it and said that he might even consider going to the extraordinary lengths of hiring a warehouse to put his wheat into in the future!
This is the same Sharad Pawar who only last week ruled out exports of government owned wheat, we can see why now because who'd want to pay good money for this?
Yes, I've got some pics for you, but I'm going to make you wait a bit longer yet.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg, or in this case the tip of an enormous pile of "cack" to use a technical term.
"Across the state, at different government warehouses, wheat grain worth 500 to 800 crores is rotting away," says the report. To save you reaching for the calculator that's USD110-175 million.
Of around 7.2 MMT of wheat in store in Punjab, that's around half of the country's buffer stocks, 6.5 MMT is being stored outside in conditions like this. I wonder what conditions the other half are being stored in? Exactly the same no doubt. That would mean that around 90% of India's 2009/10 ending wheat stocks potentially look like this:
Video Nasty
Other links: here and here
An Indian TV reporter has stumbled across wheat in Punjab worth 15 crores (a crore is Indian for a bloody big number, 15 of them is around USD3.3 million), in what can only be described as a bit of a state. We're talking a not even fit for the cat kind of a state.
Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, nice lad that he is, has promised to look into it and said that he might even consider going to the extraordinary lengths of hiring a warehouse to put his wheat into in the future!
This is the same Sharad Pawar who only last week ruled out exports of government owned wheat, we can see why now because who'd want to pay good money for this?
Yes, I've got some pics for you, but I'm going to make you wait a bit longer yet.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg, or in this case the tip of an enormous pile of "cack" to use a technical term.
"Across the state, at different government warehouses, wheat grain worth 500 to 800 crores is rotting away," says the report. To save you reaching for the calculator that's USD110-175 million.
Of around 7.2 MMT of wheat in store in Punjab, that's around half of the country's buffer stocks, 6.5 MMT is being stored outside in conditions like this. I wonder what conditions the other half are being stored in? Exactly the same no doubt. That would mean that around 90% of India's 2009/10 ending wheat stocks potentially look like this:
Video Nasty
Other links: here and here
