Pakistan: Poverty, food insecurity rise

Editorial:The Frontier Post

That the party which committed to itself to establish an egalitarian society, is conceding in its fourth government that poverty and food insecurity have risen in the tenure of its fourth government, must be seen with a agonizing eye. This candid admission came in a Senate session on Thursday when the Ministry of Food Security accepted that poverty has been increasing in the country since the PPP-led coalition entered the corridors of power. Although not much of data was provided, the World Bank and the UNDP have said that 17.2 per cent of Pakistanis were living below the poverty line in 2007-08. This means that the monthly income of a family rests around $100 a month and this is abysmally low when considered in the backdrop that a few hundred Pakistanis have their money in foreign banks said to be more than $100 billion and affluent people do not pay their taxes. As for food insecurity, the ministry said the number of people falling under the poverty line had been increasing constantly and more than 58 per cent population was food insecure by 2011.The ministry said that the National Nutrition Survey, 2011, conducted by the Benazir Income Support Program, showed that 58 per cent of Pakistanis were food insecure and 29.6 percent of them were suffering with hunger or severe hunger. Both the questions relate to fundamental human rights which comes to low priority in this land the pure. This points out to the failure of the country’s poverty alleviation plan under the World Bank-sponsored Benazir Income Support Programme that is hardly seen helping the needy. The BISP initiated a National Zero Hunger Plan and the prime minister made announcement on March 21 this year. But the plan has no far stepped beyond the announcement stage.Coming to food security plans, the government cannot hopefully succeed when agriculture, that contributes 24 per cent of the GDP, employs 48 per cent of the country’s labour force and contributes about 60 per cent to export earnings, remains a losing activity with mounting prices of fertilizers and other inputs whose cost is much higher that actual yield. Although the government raised the wheat support price from Rs1050 to Rs1,200 per 40 KG, farming activity is not likely to pick up because land holdings, among other factors, are highly unjustified because it is the big landlord who ultimately benefits at the cost of about 90 per cent peasantry. In short, this is only one aspect of an exploitative class-ridden society which leans heavily on the side of the high and mighty and forsakes the weak and the poor, no less than 95 per cent of the population.