The Economic Co-ordination Committee (ECC) of the Cabinet has been informed that food insecure population of the country has reached 58 percent due to lack of sufficient income to purchase desired calories and unavailability of adequately nutritious food, it was learnt.
Sources told Business Recorder that meeting was told that despite being a cereal-surplus country, Pakistan has a sizeable segment of food insecure population and National Nutrition Survey, 2011 conducted jointly by the Ministry of Health and Unicef put the figure to 58 percent of the total population in the country as food insecure. This was largely because of the problems of access to food in remote or disaster stricken areas, lack of sufficient income to purchase desired calories of food every day and unavailability of high quality or adequately nutritious food. The meeting was informed that in absolute numbers, over 62 million people are food insecure in 35 districts spread over Balochistan, KP, FATA, GB, and parts of Sindh and Punjab.
The situation was alarming for the government and compelled to devise in collaboration with World Food Programme (WFP) a zero hunger programme and a Letter of Intent (LoI) was signed between Ministry of Food of National Security and WFP. Under the LoI, the government has agreed to donate 0.5 million tons wheat for conversions into high nutrition diets and its distribution under school feeding programme in the most food insecure districts, nutrition programs for children under the age of five years and nutrition programs for pregnant and lactating mothers was part of zero hunger plan. The cost associated with conversion and distribution of the donated wheat shall be picked up by WFP.
The meeting was informed that with this commitment, Pakistan's status has elevated from a recipient of aid for its people to a donor in the eyes of the international community. The WFP has been able to arrange Rs 3.1 billion as matching funding in a matter of two weeks only and there is a plan to raise Rs 20 billion by the end of current calendar year to implement Prime Ministers vision.
The Ministry of Food and National Security has proposed to the ECC to donate 0.2 million tons wheat to the WFP from 1.2 million tons wheat stock currently with Pakistan Agricultural Storage and Services Corporation Ltd (Passco). With this donation from the government of Pakistan for its people along with cash resources generated by the World Food Programme, the authorities aim to achieve; (i) provision of enriched food to 60,000 malnourished lactating and pregnant mothers, and 170,000 malnourished children under the age of five; (ii) serving food to 1,300,000 primary school-going children under the Food for Education Programme; (iii) catering to the nutritional needs of 200,000 vulnerable people under the Food for Work Program to help them rebuild their livelihoods; (iv) catering to the nutrition needs of 800,000 disaster affected people;(v) creating jobs in the vulnerable areas through transportation, processing and distribution of food.
The WFP is already engaged with the provincial and district governments and NGOs in the food distribution work. During 2011, WFP served 17.4 million beneficiaries by distributing 437.000 metric tons of food products, of which 62 percent were procured from within Pakistan. The beneficiaries were selected on the basis of food security analysis and regular monitoring of food prices and their impact in food poor districts as well as household surveys conducted in collaboration with the civil society organisations and government departments. The oversight came from the provincial departments of education and other implementing partners. Currently, they are distributing fortified food in 53 districts and supporting livelihood activities in 28 districts.
However, the Finance division has not agreed to the proposal of Ministry of National Food Security & Research for donating 0.2 million tons wheat because of financial implication but requested the ECC to consider approving one-time donation of 50,000 metric tons from the reserves of Passco.