Hunger pains: Pakistan's food insecurity

WASHINGTON - Woodrow Wilson Center in collaboration with the Fellowship Fund for Pakistan held a conference to illustrate the magnitude and manifestations of Pakistan’s food insecurity to identify its possible causes and to consider ways forward, says a press release.
Those who spoke on the occasion include Zafar Altaf, Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (Islamabad); Sohail Jehangir Malik, Innovative Development Strategies (Islamabad); Saadia Toor, College of Staten Island, City University of New York; Roshan Malik, Iowa State University; Abid Qaiyum Suleri, Sustainable Development Policy Institute (Islamabad); Kenneth Iain MacDonald, University of Toronto; Allan Jury, World Food Programme and Gautam Hazarika, University of Texas at Brownsville.
In recent weeks, Pakistan’s military has been waging a full-scale campaign against the Taliban. This operation has displaced several million people and is threatening their access to food. This developing humanitarian crisis is exacerbating Pakistan’s already-widespread food insecurity. According to 2008 data from the World Food Programme, 77 million Pakistanis - nearly half the country’s total population - are food insecure, while 95 of Pakistan’s 121 districts face problems such as hunger and malnutrition-related disease. Last year, a UNICEF report concluded that half of all child deaths in Pakistan can be attributed to poor nutrition.
In the conference’s opening address, Zafar Altaf of the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council pointed out the key obstacles to improving Pakistan’s food security, including a disproportionate emphasis on wheat, inefficiencies of fertilizer and irrigation systems, poor infrastructure in the western provinces, and a lack of innovative knowledge generation. He emphasised the importance of improving both socio-economic conditions and the quality of research institutions. Such improvements are needed in order to break the cycle of sub-optimal policies and to produce imaginative solutions. In Altaf’s view, the single most beneficial initiative toward strengthening food security in Pakistan would be to bring Balochistan’s currently uncultivable - but abundantly available - land into use.
Hunger, according to Abid Qaiyum Suleri of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute poses more of a security than a humanitarian threat to Pakistan. Suleri, the conference’s luncheon speaker, asserted that steady increases in the number of food-insecure individuals have led to class conflict (between “haves” and “have-nots”) and violence that ultimately weaken the state. The high prevalence of food insecurity has intensified “extraordinary behavior,” giving rise to suicides, suicide attacks, and the selling of children, and hastening the loss of dignity. To address this crisis, Suleri proposed a “paradigm shift” in public spending that moves away from national defense and toward social development, and that benefits the individual, not the state. Suleri called on the international community to step up activities that improve Pakistan’s distribution of food to those in need, that increase food absorption capacities in camps for the internally displaced, and that expand the reach of humanitarian operations already under way. “It’s not the atomic bomb,” Suleri declared, “but the courage of the individual [that is] needed for social change.”