Faisalabad: Government needs to take urgent steps to seize further devaluation of Pak Rupee detrimental to the economy, contain

inflation, common man will also badly hurt, said Mian Zahid Aslam, President Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry (FCCI) here today. He said that Rupee devaluation would multiply the cost of doing business, affecting the productivity of economy and competitiveness of exports, lowering the import-substitution process and hurting the trade and industrial activities in the country as import prices for machinery and industrial raw material will be increased. He said that import bill will further inflate due to Pakistans higher reliance on imports, particularly the oil and petroleum products already surpassing US$ 14 billion in the last year. He said that our economy has now revival trend after a long slump in the past years as all sectors of economy were evidently showing negative growth in the last year. However, further fall in the value of Rupee if not controlled, will cause re-contraction in economic and industrial activities leading to reduced tax revenue for government and fiscal deficit target fixed for 2013-14 unachievable. He said that present pace of the depreciation of the rupee will push up the inflation to go further high and a common man will hurt badly in these days of growing cost-push inflation. He said that the depreciation of the Pak Rupee will add in billions in rupee term to the volume of foreign debts of the country, which now stands at US$ 65 billion. of the country in rupee terms. He said that remittances by overseas Pakistanis are getting pace as a greater support to the depleting foreign exchange reserves and balance of payments position of the country. Their remittance through banking channel will also affect the level and pace achieved uptil now. He said that the competitiveness of Pakistanis products might affect due to increase in import prices of industrial machinery and raw materials. He said that Pak Rupee parity viz Dollar has already lowered to 60% during the previous regime and the current slide will aggravate the situation further if the damaging effect is not contained.

He urged the Government to take immediate steps to control the sliding of Pak Rupee and bring stabilization in exchange rate in the best interest of economy, businesses and common man.

Islamabad eyes biggest wheat imports in 5 years

Pakistan is set to become a net wheat importer this year with purchases climbing to the highest in five years after delayed planting and reduced fertilizer use hit domestic output and drove up local prices. The South Asian nation, which has been exporting wheat for the last three years, joins a growing list of countries that have seen production curbed, squeezing global supplies and buoying prices. Pakistan is likely to ship in 800,000 tonnes to 1mn tonnes of wheat in the year to March 2014, traders said, the most since 2008/09 and way up from the 200,000 tonnes bought last year. Supply will mainly come from the Black Sea region due to competitive prices offered there. We are have just finished the harvest and one would imagine that everything is alright but prices are moving higher, said a Karachi-based grains trader. There is shortfall in the market as our production was well below the governments target and there has been drawdown in stocks. Wheat production in Pakistan slid to 23.3mn tonnes in 2012/13, the lowest in four years and down from 25mn tonnes a year ago, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Output in 2013/14 is estimated at 24mn tonnes. Traders said tighter domestic supplies would further jeopardise plans to export wheat to Iran under a 1mn tonne barter deal agreed last year that has been stymied by wrangling over details.

Shipments havent taken place since last year and it is even more unlikely now, said another trader in Karachi. They keep on talking about it but we dont believe it will happen. A Pakistani food ministry official said the deal was still being decided. Food imports are not affected by Western sanctions on Iran. As part of the broad scheme, Iran last month agreed to take wheat worth $9mn from Islamabad in exchange for settling part of payment owed by Pakistan for electricity supply. Pakistans wheat output has been hit by delayed planting caused by late harvests of other crops such as cotton and sugarcane. Farmers usually finish wheat seeding by November but that stretched right up to January this year in some parts of the country, traders said. Reduced fertilizer-usage due to rising prices has also hit crop yields. The decline in Pakistans wheat production mirrors similar drops in top exporters and producers the US, China, Russia and parts of Europe. Although Pakistans estimated imports of 800,000 tonnes to 1mn tonnes are paltry in terms of global trade of 148mn tonnes, any additional demand for milling wheat will further strain global supplies. China has been on a wheat buying spree after as much as 16% of its production was damaged by rains ahead of harvest. It is likely to surpass Egypt as the worlds top wheat importer. Global wheat prices rose 2.4% in July on the Chicago Board of Trade even as corn and soybeans suffered deep losses on expectations of higher production. Global wheat output is expected to rise this year from last, but will still be below demand, leaving the world with the lowest wheat stocks since 2008/09. In Pakistans financial centre of Karachi, wheat prices have jumped to $340-$350 a tonne from the around $300-$310 a tonne typical at this time of year.

Pakistan is likely to source the bulk of its supplies from the Black Sea due to lower prices, traders said, adding that the country has already booked some 250,000 tonnes. Authorities in Pakistan are under pressure from the industry and state governments to abolish a 5-% withholding tax on wheat imports which will bring down the cost of the imported grain. The cabinets Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) is likely to take up the issue in the coming days, traders said. Prices in the domestic market are much higher than international prices, said one Singapore-based trader who has been selling cargoes to Pakistan. We think they will be active in the market for the next few months. gulf-times

The Future of Agriculture May Be Up

Want to see where your food might come from in the future? Look up. The seeds of an agricultural revolution are taking root in cities around the world a movement that boosters say will change the way that urbanites get their produce and solve some of the world's biggest environmental problems along the way. It's called vertical farming, and it's based on one simple principle: Instead of trucking food from farms into cities, grow it as close to home as possiblein urban greenhouses that stretch upward instead of sprawling outward. The idea is flowering in many forms. There's the 12-story triangular building going up in Sweden, where plants will travel on tracks from the top floor to the bottom to take advantage of sunlight and make harvesting easier. Then there's the onetime meatpacking plant in Chicago where vegetables are grown on floating rafts, nourished by waste from nearby fish tanks. And the farms dotted across the U.S. that hang their crops in the air, spraying the roots with nutrients, so they don't have to bring in soil or water tanks for the plants. However vertical farming is implemented, advocates say the immediate benefits will be easy to see. There won't be as many delivery trucks guzzling fuel and belching out exhaust, and city dwellers will get easier access to fresh, healthy food. Looking further, proponents say vertical farming could bring even bigger and more sweeping changes. Farming indoors could reduce the use of pesticides and herbicides, which pollute the environment in agricultural runoff. Preserving or reclaiming more natural ecosystems like forests could help slow climate change. And the more food we produce indoors, the less susceptible we are to environmental crises that

disrupt crops and send prices skyrocketing, like the drought that devastated this year's U.S. corn crop. Dickson Despommier, a microbiology professor at Columbia University who developed the idea of vertical farming with students in 1999, thinks vertical farming will become more and more attractive as climate change drives up the cost of conventional farming and technological advances make greenhouse farming cheaper. In fact, he hopes the world will be able to produce half of its food in vertical farms in 50 years. Then "a significant portion of farmland could be abandoned," he says. "Ecosystem functions would rapidly improve, and the rate of global warming would slow down."

An Idea on the Rise A host of vertical farms are up and running in the U.S. and overseas, and others are under construction. Some are backed by nonprofits aiming to promote environmental causes or local job creation. Others will be for-profit ventures meant to meet demand for local produce. And some, like one in South Korea, are being funded by governments looking for ways to boost domestic food security. So far, vertical farms are producing only a small amount of food. Advocates are still developing different building designs and growing techniques to boost the efficiency of cultivating food indoors. And a proven business model based on the concept has yet to emerge. One ambitious project under construction is trying to address all of those challenges at once. At 12 stories, the triangular farm in Linkping, Sweden, will be one of the tallest vertical farms in the world most max out at several storiesand will use innovative ways to generate revenue. Not only will the company behind the farm, Sweden's Plantagon, sell its produce at a local farmer's market, but it also will lease out office space on most floors. Another unique feature: Outside the office windows, on the building's southern face, a mechanical track enclosed in its own layer of glass will carry growing plants from the top of the building to the bottom floor. The arrangement is meant to give the plants even exposure to sunlight and allow Plantagon to perform all of its planting and harvesting in one placeon the ground floor. (After planting, a normal vertical elevator takes the boxed plants to the top floor to start their voyage down.) The company plans to produce 300 to 500 metric tons of leafy greens like bok choy a year. Offsetting Costs As for the price tag, "it's much more expensive, of course, to build a greenhouse vertical than to build a normal greenhouse," says Hans Hassle, Plantagon's chief executive. But the planned revenue streams will help make up for that, and energy costs will be lower because the setup will use waste from various sourcessuch as heat from a nearby power plant and biogas produced through conversion of the building's own organic garbage. All told, the planned energy-saving measures will reduce the building's energy use by at least 30% to 50%, Mr. Hassle says. Mr. Hassle says the company's next greenhouse will be either a demonstration model in Shanghai or a research facility in Singapore. These are good venues for the idea, he says, because they're highly dense and urbanized societies that already need to produce more food locally. In the U.S., vertical farms are sprouting in urban areas across the country, some in old buildings that have been repurposed for agriculture. One operation called the Plant is producing vegetables in a three-story former meatpacking facility on Chicago's South Side. The farm grows vegetables on small rafts floating on water, which is filled with nutrients from waste produced by fish in a separate tank a setup called aquaponics. Light comes from lamps designed to emit the proper wavelengths for plant growth. The Plant is also designing a growing system in which crops could grow sticking out at an upward angle from vertical boards, with nutrients provided to the plant roots by water dripping down a film from pipes near the ceiling.

The Plant was founded by John Edel, a 43-year-old Chicago native who has led other projects to renovate and reuse urban buildings. The facility currently rents out parts of its space to tenants including three farmers and two bakeries and plans to find more; it also intends to open a shared retail area where the tenants can sell their goods. Other farms around the country use different techniques designed to save space, reduce water consumption and even avoid the need for soil. Farms in warehouses and other buildings in Seattle, Chicago, upstate New York and New Jersey, among other places, use an aeroponics system from AeroFarms of Ithaca, N.Y. The method involves growing plants with their roots hanging in the air, where they can be sprayed with water and nutrients. Omega Garden Inc., of Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, sells a planting device called Volksgarden, a rotating cylinder four feet in diameter and two feet long. Plants grow in a circle around the inside of the cylinder. As the device rotates, their roots dip into a tray holding a liquid solution that provides water and nutrients. A light runs horizontally through the cylinder to nourish the crops. Green Spirit Farms LLC is using the system in New Buffalo, Mich., in a former plastics-injection facility. The farm plans to fill the space with Volksgarden units stacked three levels high, says Green Spirit site manager Ben Wiggins. Simpler Solutions Still, many agricultural experts aren't sold on the idea of vertical farming. The core argument against it: Conventional farms are the simplest and most efficient places to produce food. Growing food indoors, using artificial lights and other special equipment, means more effort and expense and cancels out any benefits of being close to customers, critics say. That's why George Monbiot, a writer and environmental activist based in Oxford, England, says there's "no prospect" that more complicated vertical-farming techniques could contribute substantially to world food production. As for those vertical farming systems that will consume extra energy to power equipment like artificial lights, he says, "Even if you are taking the energy from renewable sources, there are better ways of using that renewable energy." Likewise, R. Ford Denison, an adjunct professor of agricultural ecology at the University of Minnesota, thinks the energy use from vertical farms would cancel out any fuel savings from transportation. "Food transport from farm to store is a tiny fraction of total agricultural energy use," he says. So if vertical farms use even small amounts of energy to run their systems, or if consumers have to use extra fuel traveling to urban farmers' markets, it "would swamp any energy savings in transporting food to the cities." Backers say the comparison between conventional and vertical farming isn't apples to apples, since the government heavily subsidizes expenses including crop insurance for traditional agriculture, greatly reducing the costs involved and the risks that farmers face from unpredictable weather conditions. Food Security But boosters say the equation will very likely change as severe weather makes indoor farming a safer and more reliable alternative to regular growing. Not only will the rising cost of conventional farming make vertical farms look better in comparison, they say, but vertical farms in some places could end up getting subsidies. "If we imagine that vertical farming is going to become part of a nation's food-security program, then naturally this part of the industry needs subsidies," Plantagon's Mr. Hassle says. Dr. Despommier, who is also an adviser to Plantagon, acknowledges that energy use, particularly in artificial lighting, remains a challenge for some vertical farms. But he says the lighting industry has made significant progress in recent years on reducing power consumption for specialized lights to grow plants, and researchers continue to work on the problem.

More broadly, he argues that the idea of vertical farming on a large scale will seem increasingly realistic as techniques evolve. He cites cellphones and plasma-screen televisions as examples of innovations that were unimaginable before their time. "You have to start small and you have to start at the research level before you jump into the commercial aspect of this thing, but that's the way all these ideas start," Dr. Despommier says. "Everything we have in this world of ours started out crazy." May 2013