Hunger in Pakistan

Pakistan hosts the poorest population with per capita income at $1550 compared with Bangladesh at $2660 and India at $2210 by the end of 2023.

While Bangladesh and India are winning at per capita income and lifting more and more people out of poverty, Pakistan is at the losing end as more and more people falling below the poverty line every year. Global entities mapping hunger around the world present a similar outlook.

Pakistan, the world’s fifth most populous country, has been ranked 99th out of 129 nations in a Global Hunger Index (GHI) report which has described its level of hunger as “serious”. The fourth edition of the report, prepared in collaboration between German non-profit Welthungerhilfe and its Irish counterpart Concern Worldwide, is a peer-reviewed publication launched in Islamabad this week.

Alarmingly, according to the report, GHI projections show that at least 46 countries in the world, including Pakistan, will fail to achieve “low hunger” by 2030.

Pakistan achieved a score of 26.1 for the 2022 report, worse than its 29.6 in the last edition of the report in 2014. The 2007 and 2000 reports showed Pakistan’s GHI score at 32.1 and 36.8, respectively.

The launch of the GHI report follows a United Nations report issued in May 2023, which designated Pakistan as a “very high concern” area facing food insecurity.

The UN report, jointly prepared by the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization, also painted a dire outlook for Pakistan, saying more than eight million people are expected to experience “high levels of acute food insecurity”.

The report points towards a tumultuous 18 months, in which a continuing political crisis has compounded the worst financial crisis the country has ever faced. Much went wrong in this period - the devastating floods which inflicted lasting damage on the economy (over USD 30 billion losses), a mounting balance-of-payment crisis which led to a huge fall in foreign reserves and increase in debt.

The country owes to its creditors more than $77 billion, payable in the next three years, according to the International Monetary Fund. Inflation has surged to a record high, touching 38 percent earlier this year, while energy tariffs have increased markedly, affecting industry and exports while the currency has plummeted by more than 50 percent against the US dollar in the past year.

The World Bank is of the view that poverty in Pakistan will inevitably increase with pressures from weak labour markets and high inflation, warning that delays in external financing, policy slippages, and political uncertainty pose significant risks to the macro poverty outlook.

In the absence of higher social spending, the lower middle-income poverty rate is expected to increase to 37.2 per cent in 2022-23, according to the World Bank report on the macro poverty outlook for Pakistan.

Given poor households’ dependency on agriculture, and small-scale manufacturing and construction activity, they remain vulnerable to economic and political shocks.

Official remittance inflows also fell by 11.1 percent, partly due to the exchange rate cap that made informal non-banking channels preferable. Any decline in overall remittances would reduce households’ capacity to cope with economic shocks, adding pressure on poverty, warns the report.

“South Asia, the region with the world’s highest hunger level, has the highest child stunting rate and by far the highest child wasting rate of any world region,” it added. Tragically, Pakistan was singled out along with five other countries with increasing stunting rates in children.

“The areas with the least improvement over time – where stunting levels either increased or stagnated were in central Chad, central Pakistan, central Afghanistan, and northeastern Angola, as well as throughout the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar,” the report said.

The worst suffering segment of society enduring the prevailing economic and political instability are the increasing poors of the nation - a reality little recognized and acted upon by the legislators who are voted to parliament to represent their interests.

The poor segments of the nation are little concerned with the liberal number of legislations related to political, legal and accountability framework and economic intricacies and all that help secure or protect the interests of the few. Hunger is the real or most important issue for the poor. A large number of them do not get even two meals a day.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023