This year, the World Food Day was again a grim reminder of the fact that how the volatile food prices continue to haunt the world population including Pakistan which is among the 21 most under-nourished countries of the world. This doesn’t strike as any shocking revelation to us as we routinely witness the haggard, emaciated and hunger stricken people all around us. While most of us continue on in our usual insensitivity towards the issue, it doesn’t change the fact that there are children with acute malnutrition issues, are in desperate need of treatment and the risk of them dieing before their 5th birthday is ten times higher than that of the healthy children.
“Food Prices: From Crisis to Stability” is theme of the World Food Day 2011 and it underlines how important it is to continue to work towards our aim of alleviating the food crises situation in Pakistan. It is strange that Pakistan’s agrarian base that earns us around 65% of our total revenue, fails to provide its people with adequate food and meet their nutritional needs. With natural disasters like Floods and Earthquakes playing the key role in further pushing us down the brink of precipice, it has been harder ever since to maintain a smooth ride up the road to betterment.
Surprising as it might sound to some, that despite all the recent floods that devastated a considerable portion of our crops, we managed to produce sufficient footstock to not only cater to our national food requirements but we were also able to save up a certain stock for exports. Our issue, according to World Food Program (WFP) is not “unavailability” but “inaccessibility” of food owing to the low income levels of our people. Ironically, the people hit most by the malnutrition are the very people who are the producers of the food i.e the people living in the rural areas of Pakistan and it does not owe to any natural calamity but to the exploitation of poor at the hands of the rich.
In a country where the nutritional status of the children under five years is painfully poor and 40% of the kids population is under weight, thanks to the jacked up food prices, we see countless chain of fast food restaurants opening up and people flocking over to them to gorge on the delectable delights. What a plain dichotomy in a society that wails for its lack of resources,raises hues and cries on inflation, and paradoxically thrifts quite a sum money to savor the foreign flavors.
For those who go for outing and buffeting around the city on a food-spree need to answer their conscience a few questions. How many of their countrymen can afford a three-time meal, how many people still can afford to have even a small portion of animal protein and fruits in their food every day? The answers are pretty much out there!
Debunking the link between food shortage and malnutrition, Ban-Ki-moon, Secretary General of United Nations in his message on the World Food Day puts , “There is more than enough food on the planet to feed everyone, yet today nearly one billion people will go hungry” Does this statement show that it is the food scanty that has stigmatized us or is that we have fallen way too short on our humanity scales that has led to this humanitarian crises. It is yet amazing that in a society of people whose very religion teaches rigorous lessons of charity and feeding the hungry failing on the very ideals it hypocritically claims to hold close.
The thinning differences between the lower and the middle class and a widening gap between the upper and the middle class owes precisely to our very selfishness as a nation. Even if each one of us makes sure that we feed only those working at our homes, these horrid rates of hunger and malnutrition will fall down. And each time we embark to satisfy our shopoholic and foodaholic instincts, if we only make sure that the “Maasi” and the “Driver” accompanying us are well fed, this anathema dogging our society would ameliorate quite automatically.
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