Its all about the calories: The rich find it hard to burn them; the poor find it hard to earn them. A rich person is capable to reject fancy food that doesn look good, but a poor chap could go for day(s) without a loaf of bread.
Irony aside, Pakistans food security situation is getting alarmingly worse. For instance, a recent SDPI-WFP report had shown that 58 percent of Pakistans population was food insecure in 2013, up from 48.6 percent in 2009. It seems that the double whammy of seemingly rising urban unemployment and the food and fuel inflations since 2008 have worsened the societys calorific intake. This food insecurity manifests in devastating forms of malnutrition, in both adults and kids.
Experts have long hymned that Pakistans problem is not "production" of food, but rather affordable access to food. There are various angles to parse the "access" conundrum - grains are left to rot in silos while millions starve - but lets put a spotlight on the issue from a different angle: "food loss".
Pakistan is similar to other developing countries in facing problems of "food loss" in its grain, vegetable and animal production. Food loss is defined by the UNs FAO as losses that "take place at production, post-harvest and processing stages in the food supply chain". Food loss is different from "food wastage", which is a problem more prevalent in the rich countries and occurs "at the end of the food chain (retail and final consumption)," due to "retailers and consumers behaviour..."
Both food loss and waste are generally clubbed as "unconsumed food", which includes only the "products that are directed to human consumption, excluding feed and parts of products which are not edible." A look at the illustration shows that food loss problem is especially severe in South and Southeast Asia, the region where Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and other poverty-ridden countries are located.
Estimates for food loss in Pakistan or other regional countries are not available, but the staggering macro impact of food loss sends chill down the spine. Recently, associates from Dalberg Global, a policy advisory firm, highlighted in a feature for the US-based Council on Foreign Relations, that one-third of global food production (1.3 billion tons) is never consumed at all every year (lost and wasted).
Every year, the unconsumed food costs $750 billion to the global economy, adds 3.3 billion tons of carbon emissions to the environment, depletes huge freshwater supplies, and puts pressure on social transfers, the researchers noted. About 90 percent of unconsumed food in developing countries is accounted for by "food loss".
"The solution to feeding a growing population is not simply to produce more food, but also to save, preserve, or recycle the food already produced. Cutting current food wastage in half, for example, would yield enough food to feed one billion people - half of the additional population expected by 2050," the authors noted.
So here is a food for thought for the policymakers if they genuinely want to bring down food insecurity indicators down the charts. Go beyond support prices and procurement drives. Find a way to involve the small farmers to accept, finance and build on-farm storage and processing facilities. Induce corporate farmers to invest their capital, technology and expertise in this area, while ensuring smallholders rights.
Thats easier said than done. But that is one of the critical areas that the public and private sectors must come together to fix. Pakistan needs to do this if it is to get more food out of the harvested crop, thus increasing the supply and making available affordable food to its growing population, especially those in poverty.