Extreme weather, more people drive country toward a wheat crisis

Gul Muhammad was expecting a decent wheat harvest this year - until torrential rains and freak hailstorms in March destroyed the crops on his farm, leaving him with no income and no way to feed his family of 10.
"I've never seen such a hailstorm before. I had only heard about such calamities from my forefathers," said Muhammad, 55, as he stood among the crushed stalks in his two-hectare (5-acre) field in Pira Fatehal, a village in Punjab.
With the crop their only source of income, "I don't know how we will get by now," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
A pattern of unusually heavy rain, hail and wind are driving country toward a food security crisis, climate experts say, with growing wheat shortages causing flour prices to skyrocket as a booming population pushes up demand.
Last year, storms late in the growing season left the national wheat harvest more than a million tonnes below the government's target of 25.5 million tonnes, according to a report by the country's Senate Standing Committee on National Food Security. Storms have both damaged crops in their path and created ideal conditions for plant-killing diseases, such as humidity-linked wheat rust, said Muhammad Riaz, director general of the Pakistan Meteorological Department.
Surveying a devastated field near Muhammad's farm in Pira Fatehal, Abdul Basit, a field assistant with Punjab's agriculture department, said recent storms had ruined more than half of the crops in the village.
"This is an arid area where farmers wait a whole year to harvest a single crop, and if that is destroyed they have no alternative to feed their families," Basit told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
More than a third of Pakistan's population of more than 200 million faces food insecurity, according to the World Food Programme. Rapid population growth is exacerbating stress on the country's wheat supply, said Syed Muzafar Hussain Shah, chairman of the senate committee on food security.
"The country's wheat consumption is rising every year with the population increase but the crop's per-hectare yield has not increased over the years," he noted. Country's population growth rate of 2.4% is the highest in South Asia and almost double the rate of other countries in the region, according to data from the UN Development Programme (UNDP).
By 2028, the country's demand for wheat is expected to shoot up by about 7 million tonnes, to more than 34 million tonnes, Shah said.
A government report published in April said the country's looming wheat crisis was the result of a range of factors, including more erratic weather and mismanagement of exports.
The Ministry of National Food Security allowed large wheat exports in 2018 and early 2019, based on an expected bumper crop in 2019, the report found.