Kerala millers urge Centre not to impose duty on wheat imports

Flour millers from Kerala have urged the Centre not to impose duty on the imports of wheat stating that overseas purchases of the cereal were negligible and mainly used for blending with the domestic produce.

The imports of wheat from countries such as Australia has been necessitated on account of deterioration of quality of wheat in India due to unseasonal rains and hailstorm in Northern India. Also, the unseasonal rains have shrunk the wheat output this year. Food Corporation of India has procured poor quality wheat from current season after relaxing norms in order to help the farmers. An estimated 5 lakh tonnes of wheat have been contracted for imports as against the domestic output out 90 million tonnes.

“Import of some quantity of high quality wheat from countries such as Australia is now a necessity in order to ensure the quality and nutritious value of the final wheat products,” said PK Ahammed, President, Kerala Roller Flour Millers Association, in a press release. The premium quality Australian wheat will be used in small quantity for blending with Indian wheat in order to produce wheat products acceptable to consumers. Already millers from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have urged the Centre to refrain from imposing any duty on wheat imports.

While requesting the government to refrain from imposing any import duty on wheat millers urged that any action of government in imposing duty should not adversely affect the already concluded contracts of the trade. “The millers have suggested that to monitor the imports government may introduce a procedure to register all import contracts with nodal agencies such as Apedea as a check and balance mechanism and such registered contracts may be exempt from duty,” Ahammed said.

The Kerala millers have contracted four full ship loads about 1.4 lakh tonnes of which two ship loads have already arrived and the remaining quantity will land by end August/early September.

“The import of 5,00,000 tonnes of wheat should not pose any problem for marketing the stocks of wheat held by FCI. Also, due to high exchange rate for dollar the imported wheat will not be cheaper than Indian wheat. The imposition of 10 per cent import duty will increase the cost of wheat and cost of production of wheat products and this increase will have to be passed on to the consumers,” he added.

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