While the future of this nation hinges on our ability to feed ourselves, it appears the rest of the world isn’t faring that well either. This week the British charity Oxfam has warned that countries around the world are headed for starvation on a scale never seen before. If the issue had been skirting across the table, Oxfam has just laid the smackdown on our hungry future and an uglier picture has seldom been painted.
According to Oxfam’s estimates prices of some staple foods are expected to double within twenty years, leading to mass world hunger and aggression. As the world population is expected to rise by a third by 2050, 9.1 billion people will need feeding. And that’s a lot of feeding. They say the demand for food would rise even higher, by as much as seventy per cent, as more prosperous economies demand more calories but by then droughts and floods would start to affect crop yields—leading to one perfect storm.
Oxfam’s warning brings to the forefront a realisation that Pakistan’s days on Old McDonald’s farm are almost Ee-I-Ee-I over. A food system relying on informality, ecological imbalances, profiteering and unfair trade will sooner have us reaching for Old Mother Hubbard’s bare cupboard unless society and government can find a solution.
For far too many years our government and food producers have gotten by on just the potential to be a breadbasket. And while they have been beaming with pride, irregularity has crept in to destroy the very foundations of a sustainable food system. As if an exploding population had not widened the gap between supply and demand of food items enough, the economic and ecological devastation of natural disasters made things more unpredictable than we could have possibly imagined. And by the time you have factored in the rising economic and environmental costs of inputs to grow and process food, you begin to see the dimensions of the problem. But this still isn’t enough for Pakistan.
Our patchwork of policies, institutions and processes involved in getting food from the farm to the fork has allowed informality to render them useless, if not other-worldly. It’s only when you take a bird’s eye view of the situation that you see that the government is out of touch with the realities of an errant food business. And the Oxfam report reinforces the fact that the failure of the food system flows from a failure of governments to regulate and to invest, which means that companies, smugglers, interest groups and elites have been able to plunder resources.
Any successes they may have achieved are ultimately unsustainable. So while a select few may be waxing lyrical about Pakistan’s potential to sell food to the world, we are actually headed for a downfall. Depleting topsoil and water, combined with increased use of pesticides and genetically modified crops will come and slap us in the face in the long run unless we begin to change the way we feed ourselves.
While discussion on the exaggerated claims of the genetic modification industry can wait for another day, clearly our farmer and our baabu will have to start thinking differently right about now.
It is not uncommon for over sixty per cent of our population dwelling in urban areas to be held hostage by the forces of food production. Yet the agriculture, livestock and irrigation sectors that support our food system are in themselves rooted in the poor system of administration of rights in land all across the country. Assuming that it is impossible to reform the unsustainable zamindaar and the wadera, culture of producing food, perhaps the public interest is best served by looking inwards for food security. And this involves enabling our urban areas to be their own breadbaskets.
If we are muddling through till we achieve self-sufficiency, it would help to observe what other countries around the world have done when faced with a food crisis. If in the past Cuba established intensive urban agricultural farms in Havana, then modern day New York City has started to outfit skyscrapers and rooftops with vertical farms that feed the locality. Pakistan can learn from them and start to utilise every available inch of urban land to grow food. Fiscal space may be created by diverting the hundreds of millions the government gives out in food subsidies towards direct investments in a community to increase its resilience to shocks to our food system. Indeed, localised food production has its obstacles but it can bring far greater benefits to the economy and can alleviate the stress on the rural areas by as early as the next harvest.
In times when food is becoming an increasingly scarce resource, one who enjoys fresh buffalo milk and home grown cherry tomatoes strongly urges you to tackle food security any which way you can. As things stand, Pakistan is one poor harvest away from chaos.
The writer is a consultant on public policy.
