LAHORE: Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz on Saturday approved a Rs10 billion subsidy to hold down flour prices and ordered more government wheat released to mills, three days after her food department said supply across the province was normal.
She called an emergency meeting by video link, expressed strong displeasure at the rise in prices and told officials to keep wheat and flour available at affordable rates under all circumstances. The meeting decided to raise the quota of subsidised government wheat issued to flour mills at Rs3,800 per maund and voiced concern at what it called artificial increases in the market.
“The burden of inflation on the people of Punjab is extremely painful. We will utilise all available resources to ensure the supply of flour at affordable prices,” the chief minister said. Affordable flour and low-cost roti, she added, would continue.
The tone was very different on Wednesday. Director General Food Amjad Hafeez said then that there was no shortage and that mills had supplied the equivalent of 470,845 ten-kilogram bags in a single day, nearly half of it milled from government wheat and sold at Rs1,100 a bag. Officials had given a similar assurance in August.
What moved in between was the price of grain. Wheat in Punjab’s open market has reached about Rs5,200 per 40 kilograms after climbing Rs400 in four days, according to market reports, and millers blame delays of more than two weeks in the release of government stocks. The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics recorded a 5.69 percent jump in flour prices in one week.
Its city data show two Punjabs. A 20kg bag was unchanged at Rs2,300 in Lahore and Rs2,200 in Faisalabad, close to the controlled rate. In Rawalpindi it rose by Rs347 to Rs3,333 and in Sialkot by Rs333 to Rs3,133, with Multan at Rs2,866. A family in Rawalpindi is paying roughly Rs1,000 more for the same bag than one in Lahore. Karachi, Islamabad and Peshawar are at Rs3,400.
The opposition says the crisis was made by policy. Dr Muzammil Iqbal Hashmi, central spokesman of the Pakistan Markazi Muslim League, said the government bought wheat from farmers at around Rs3,500 per maund through 11 private companies and that the price has since risen to Rs6,000 by his count. Neither growers nor consumers gained, he argued.
He alleged that the subsidy could end up benefiting those same companies and asked the government to state plainly whether the money would lower prices for consumers or raise private profits. He demanded disclosure of the procurement details, action against hoarders and subsidies that reach buyers directly. The party made a similar charge this week over electricity tariffs.
The chief minister’s statement does not say how the Rs10 billion will be routed, whether through mills, through the firms holding stocks or to households. That detail will decide whether the allegation has substance.
The procurement model dates from January. Punjab’s Wheat Policy 2026 set a benchmark of Rs3,500 per maund and handed reserve-building to selected private firms, with the government covering 70 percent of their borrowing costs and lending its warehouses. By May, Dawn reported, the scheme had stalled because the open market was paying Rs3,700. Pakistan Kisan Ittehad president Khalid Khokhar said at the time that many southern Punjab farmers had already sold at about Rs3,100.
The pain is national. Former finance minister Asad Umar wrote on X that flour is up 21 percent in a year and 81 percent over Shehbaz Sharif’s tenure, and that the poor have cut their food intake by 16 percent. Citing the World Bank, he asked whether flour would get a press conference or an all-parties conference of its own. The PML-N’s official account, for its part, posted the chief minister’s pledge of cheap flour and roti.
In Karachi, Abdul Rauf Ibrahim of the Wholesale Grocers Association called the daily increases alarming. Mill flour there has reached Rs155 a kilogram and chakki flour Rs180. He said imported wheat is due in November and warned that flour could touch Rs250 a kilogram if nothing is done.
Under the IMF programme, whose latest review Pakistan cleared this week, the federal and provincial governments are withdrawing from wheat procurement and from fixing support prices, according to food ministry documents. The same documents put this year’s availability at 31.78 million tonnes against a requirement of 31.66 million, a margin of barely 120,000 tonnes. Across the border, India’s Tribune newspaper has already headlined a Pakistani flour crisis.
For Lahore the immediate test is the tandoor. The district administration fixed naan at Rs20 and roti at Rs14 last month. On the street, tandoors are charging Rs30 for a naan and Rs20 for a roti, The Lahore Times has found. That is half as much again as the official price for naan and over 40 percent more for roti.
The gap is telling because Lahore is where the flour bag has not moved. If bread already costs more than the notified rate in the one city where subsidised flour is arriving, the subsidy alone will not bring it down without enforcement at the counter.
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