Pakistan will look to source vegetables from India during October after heavy flooding in one of the country’s major agricultural regions has lead to crop shortages.
“The country is likely to import vegetables from India in October, like last year, when floods had destroyed vast swathes of farmland,” Haji Shah Jehan of the Welfare Association of Wholesale Vegetable Markets in Karachi told Pakistani newspaper the Daily News.
Typically around 800 to 1,000 trucks carrying fruit and vegetables would arrive at the Karachi markets but following the start of the rains that number had fallen to 200 to 250 trucks per day, he said.“The natural calamity has destroyed the agricultural supply chain.”
Mr Shah Jehan told the newspaper the damage to the region’s fresh produce crops would be better understood once floodwaters had receded.
The major fruit growing provinces of Balochistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab, however, were largely unaffected, he said.
Sindh is predominantly a vegetable growing region.
