According to a soon to be released report by the UN World Food Programme (WFP), of the 56 million people living in Pakistan’s urban areas, about 21 million are now deemed food insecure.
Ninety-five of the country’s 121 districts now face food insecurity problems, including malnutrition, under-nutrition, hunger, disease and poverty, the new study revealed.
“This is alarming,” Sahib Haq, head of WFP’s vulnerability analysis and mapping (VAM) unit and author of the study, told IRIN in Islamabad.
“With rapid urbanisation on the rise, the food security situation looks set to worsen,” he said, citing issues of availability, access, and health indicators.
Provincial breakdown
In Sindh Province six out of 17 districts with urban populations are now described as highly food insecure, while in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province five out of 20 districts are now classified as extremely food insecure.
The entire Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where earning a living is difficult and cultivated land is at a minimum, were now deemed food insecure, the WFP report said.
Pakistan’s populous and largely agricultural Punjab Province was comparatively better off than the rest of the country, but problems with access to food remain, according to WFP. Only nine districts out of 34 reportedly had adequate levels of food security.
Low purchasing power
In 78 percent of the country’s districts with urban populations, per capita income was below US$100 a month, the report noted.
The study, the first of its kind in Pakistan, follows a similar WFP report in 2003 assessing food security in rural areas – a report that revealed that about 39 million of the country’s rural population were food insecure.
With land ownership at a minimum, agricultural work was increasingly becoming less viable for the average agricultural worker, prompting many day-labourers to move to the country’s larger cities and towns in search of jobs.
“Some find jobs, some don’t. But once they move from the rural areas they generally can’t go back,” Haq said.
Many people were constructing homes and roads on former agricultural land. “Day by day, the cultivated land is going down,” he said.
Moreover, people living in urban areas will increasingly be dependent on food imports unless dramatic changes are made soon.
Key challenges
“On the one hand food productivity is not increasing in line with the growth in the population, while on the other we are not planning on the import side,” one food expert, who did not want to be identified, told IRIN.
“Imports will mostly be for the urban areas where the problem is most felt now,” he said.
“The government says it is increasing cultivatable land, but there has been no significant improvement in the country’s irrigation infrastructure,” he said, noting the large amount of potentially cultivatable wasteland.
Over recent years, Pakistan has experienced a deficit in wheat production except in 2006-2007 when a bumper crop was harvested because of good weather, the WFP report said. The study warned that since wheat is a key contributor to daily caloric intake in the country, the deficit in wheat production translated into caloric shortfalls leading to food insecurity.
