Soaring food prices and lack of political will has brought people, including farmers, to starvation. The representatives of Oxfam stated this on Tuesday during a media conference at the National Press Club.
They said the poverty rate in Pakistan had officially jumped from 24 to 38 percent between 2005 and 2009 while the latest figures suggested that 72.9 million people had fallen below the poverty line and hundreds of thousands of others barely managed to have their basic needs met. Less than half of all rural households owned agricultural land while the top 2.5 percent of households possessed 40 percent of the total land.
“Landless farmers especially women and small farmers, particularly in the acute poverty pockets of the country, need to be at the centre of all agricultural policies.
Timely availability of inputs such as certified seed, quality fertiliser and legal support as well as the necessary equipment must be made possible to help them better grow the food that they and all of us consume,” Oxfam Country Programme Manager Iftikhar Khalid said in his message to the participants.
The Oxfam officials said depleting land and energy resources, inadequate land distribution especially among women, lack of implementation of pro-poor agricultural policies, the gathering pace of climate change and recurrent natural disasters were interconnected and directly affecting food security, adding that Pakistan must urgently start tackling the big issues around food to ensure that everyone always had enough to eat.
They warned that every day more and more people were going hungry and with the country predicted to be the fourth most populous nation by 2050, agricultural reform could not be awaited any longer.
Oxfam lauded the land distribution schemes of the governments of the Punjab and Sindh under, which the state land was awarded to many landless farmers.
It stressed the need to protect these entitlements from forceful take-over by influential landlords and corporate sector.
It also asked the government to ensure the provision of specialised services for pest management, veterinary care, water management and creation of farmers’ organisations to guarantee improved food production and fair returns for growers.
