Pakistan’s deadliest floods in its history damaged more than a million acres of sugar cane, cotton and rice fields and caused 250 billion rupees ($2.9 billion) of agricultural losses, a farmers’ group said.
Floodwaters ravaged 700,000 acres of planted cotton, and 200,000 acres each of rice and cane, Mohammed Ibrahim Moghul, chairman of Agri Forum Pakistan, said by phone. Rains also destroyed 500,000 metric tons of wheat, 300,000 acres of animal fodder and 100,000 head of livestock, he said.
Wheat prices gained in Chicago after five days of declines and sugar rose in New York and London on speculation the losses may force the world’s sixth most-populous country to import the staples. Pakistani officials appealed for urgent deliveries of food, shelters and medicine for 14 million people displaced by the catastrophe that’s killed at least 1,600 people and is now in its third week.
“Dozens of districts have been totally flooded, which means crops have been damaged, strategic food stocks have been damaged and the soil destroyed,” Maria Kuusisto, an analyst at consultant Eurasia Group, said from London. “These floods have caused severe damage to agriculture in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in Punjab and south in Sindh. These are the agricultural hubs.”
Flood surges triggered by unprecedented monsoon rains have swept south along the 3,200-kilometer (2,000-mile) long Indus River, devastating low-lying areas of Punjab and Sindh provinces, the densely populated economic and agricultural heartland of Pakistan.
‘Buy now’
“If the cane fields are destroyed, there’s no time to replant and grow cane for the coming season,” said Sergey Gudoshnikov, an economist at the International Sugar Organization in London. “If Pakistan believes the sugar market is going to continue to go up, they may buy now.”
Pakistan’s cotton production will be less than forecast, a producers’ group said yesterday and shipments of rice from the nation, the third-largest supplier, may slump after crops and stockpiles in areas that represent 90 percent of the country’s output were damaged, Samarendu Mohanty, an economist from the International Rice Research Institute, said in an interview.
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“A lot of stored grains have also been damaged,” curbing seed supply for next year’s crop,’’ he said.
Punjab, which was among the provinces hit by flooding, accounted for nearly 60 percent of the nation’s rice harvest, and Sindh 30 percent, Mohanty said. The country was to ship 3.8 million tons this year, more than 10 percent of the estimated global shipments of 30.4 million tons, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, which made the forecast in July, before the flooding.
“We might see higher grain trade across the globe” as Pakistan steps up purchases, said Amol Tilak, a senior research analyst at Kotak Commodity Services Ltd. in Mumbai.
December-delivery wheat rose 1.5 percent to $7.36 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade at 4:43 p.m. in Mumbai, taking the contract’s gains to 53 percent since July 1. Refined sugar for October delivery rose 1.2 percent to $538.70 a ton at 12:16 p.m. on NYSE Liffe in London.