PAKISTAN: Urban food security deteriorating - WFP study

Photo: David Swanson/IRIN

Basic food necessities have risen substantially in Pakistan's urban areas where approximately 35 percent of the country's 160 million inhabitants now live.

ISLAMABAD, 8 January 2008 (IRIN) - Rising food prices and low purchasing power are leading to increased food insecurity in Pakistan’s growing cities and towns, where some 35 percent of the country’s over 160 million inhabitants now live.

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

The problem is particularly severe in Balochistan Province where 20 out of 25 districts with urban populations are now classified as highly food insecure.

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

“Purchasing power in many areas is low,” WFP’s Haq said. “Even if the food is there, if they don’t have the purchasing power they can’t afford to buy it.”

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

According to food experts, the government has yet to adequately plan for this reality - not just for the amount of food imports it will need, but also the research and expertise needed to address the true scope of the problem.

“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.

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