It should take us more than the “World Food Day”, or some report by a donor agency to start wondering about food security in the country. The country’s elite gave a lip service on the damning food security situation in the country yesterday (October 16), on account of the World Food Day celebrated by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and several other global organisations dealing directly or indirectly with food security. But it always seems to end there.
It’s ironic that the urgency of the issue at hand and the attitude of those at the helm don’t match. FOOD INSECURITY IN ASIA: Why Institutions Matter – a report by Asian Development Bank is just a recent reminder of the paucity of action by those in charge, directly and indirectly.
The report highlights that better resource endowment in Pakistan and Indonesia has not resulted in higher levels of food security; there is a lack of economic access to food by many low income people; and the prevalence of undernourishment is high. These are no surprises; but surprisingly, they remain the least of priorities in the country’s state of affairs.
Factors affecting food security are also not new. Poverty incidence, corruption and political instability are named as key driving factors for low food security – the latter two are notching highs recently, while nothing new has been achieved on the poverty front!
The report points out that at the national level, the supply of dietary energy is more than adequate, with the average dietary energy supply adequacy (ADESA) being over 100 percent since the early 1990s. Pakistan is an agrarian country; it can grow its food. Its comfortable food supply situation should mean that there is enough food for its people. However, the food security indicators (see table) show that there are high levels of wasting, stunted, and underweight children under 5 years of age, and that there exists a high prevalence of undernourishment, which suggest that some people do not have sufficient economic access to the required amount of food.
Some recent estimates by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) show that around 37.5 million or more than 20 percent of the people in Pakistan are not receiving proper nourishment. And alarmingly, the malnourishment statistics show that half of all in children in Pakistan are chronically malnourished (also known as stunting), whereas 11 percent are acutely malnourished. Malnourishment has severe effects on their mental and physical growth, which in turn affects the economic development of the country where a majority of the population is rendered useless.
The Global Hunger Index (GHI) in its 2017 report has ranked Pakistan on a “serious” level with a score of 32.6 showing that the country has performed worse than India and Bangladesh that have scored 31.4 and 26.5, respectively. The GHI calculates the scores based on four components that include undernourishment (insufficient caloric intake), child wasting (low weight for height), child stunting (low height for age) and child mortality.
The higher the score, the more serious is the hunger level in that country. According to this index, the percentage of undernourished population in Pakistan stands at around 20 percent, whereas Bangladesh and India have 15 and 14.5 percent, respectively. A comparison between the three Asian countries is shown in the table.
The country is suffering and the challenge of food security is getting more complex as the water crisis also picks up momentum. These issues need to be dealt on war footings. Only words and advocacy won’t help. Action is needed. The policy makers need to fix their priorities before it’s too late; no one likes overheads and bridges, and state-of- the-art roads and tunnels when the stomach is growling!