Import of Wheat - Exempted from Customs Duty
AT present wheat attracts an effective rate of 10% customs duty till 28th of February 2017. Now the Government has exempted it totally without an end date. Notification No. 12/2012-Cus is suitably amended.
Mr. Sitaram Yechury found fault with this move also. He tweeted:
0% import duty on Wheat means this govt is fearing food-shortages, having destroyed the Annadata, by starving them of Cash; But this 0% duty on Wheat means that our Farmers will be starved further and foreign food corporates will rake in super-profits; So, this furthering of super-profits of foreign capital at the expense of Indian farmers is RSS/BJP's idea of Nationalism.
Reuters reported from Sydney:
Wheat futures rose slightly on Thursday as the Indian government's decision to end wheat import duties boosted expectations of new global demand; Wheat is seeing support today from the news that India is removing its wheat import tariffs; Indian trade sources estimate imports could rise to six million tonnes, the highest in a decade; Indian wheat prices hit a record high last month.
Economist Tim Worstall wrote in Forbes,
The Indian government has just announced that it is going to cut the import duty on wheat to 0% from the former 10% (and the even earlier 25%). This is of course a sensible move for all tariffs on everything should always be at 0%, for two blindingly obvious reasons which all too many people fail to grasp. The first is that the economy ought to be run for the interests of consumers, not whichever producers manage to grab the ear of government. And secondly because imports are the very thing that make us all richer, they are the point and purpose of trade itself. This is thus a Good Thing; There should never have been such a tariff in the first place of course; Private importers purchased about 500,000 tonnes of wheat, largely from Australia, in the past month after the world's second-biggest producer of the grain cut the duty to 10% from 25% in September.
Notification No. , Dated: December 08, 2016