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The Afghan Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock says it is planning to store 4.5 million tonnes of wheat for emergency situations this year

Officials in the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock say the establishment of wheat stockpiles is among its priorities and it has built grain stores with the capacity of 200,000 metric tonnes of wheat in the past two years.

The Ministry adds that it has stored more than 75,000 tonnes of wheat and it is planning to store a significant amount of wheat to meet the grain demands in emergency situations.

The Ministry is also planning to construct all the needed stockpiles in the next five years to meet emergency demands.

"We are also planning to buy 100,000 metric tonnes of wheat from farmers across the country, and store them in our stockpiles that have the full capacity of storing grains now, and use them in emergency situations," a spokesman for the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock told TOLOnews.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock says despite its limited resources, it has the ability to control wheat prices to some extent when there is less grain in the markets.

The report comes after the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) had published a report recently that counted Afghanistan among the most food-insecure countries in the world.