EDITORIAL: Nobody should be surprised that Pakistan is doing so badly on the Global Hunger Index (GHI), ranking 99 out of 121 countries with sufficient data to calculate 2022 GHI scores.
It’s not just all the factors listed in the Index – armed conflicts, climate change and coronavirus pandemic that intensify each other – that limit access to food across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, but also Pakistan’s own internal situation that is responsible for this “serious level of hunger”.
Home to the world’s fifth largest population with poverty rates already among the top 10 in the world, not to mention very high levels of illiteracy, the country has witnessed, and continues to witness, an epic destruction of the middle- and lower-income groups because of its debt distress and close shave with default.
Even the IMF (International Monetary Fund) program, which is essential to stay solvent, mandates acute contraction of fiscal and monetary policies with a very direct, and very adverse, effect on the common man; especially with the government’s over reliance on indirect taxation to meet very steep revenue targets.
Coming on the heels of the pandemic, the current environment of high unemployment and very high inflation is pushing a very large number of people back below the poverty line. And that, as GHI results show, has caused unprecedented levels of hunger.
This completely changes the complexion of the situation and raises the stakes for the administration. It must turn the economy around, save people from hunger, and also prevent a social breakdown, which is a very real and grim possibility when such large numbers face such acute poverty and decide to take their anger out on the people that haven’t suffered as badly, yet. There’s a reason history books are filled with such horror stories.
Unfortunately, the political elite is so consumed in the fight for power and privilege that it would be a small miracle if the hunger report even registers on its radar. Even now, when the economic breakdown has forced an existential threat on the country, headlines are struggling to keep up with ‘who is doing what’, even bending the rules, to get their men into the caretaker setup.
They could, and should, have sanitised the politics by putting everything else aside and declaring an economic emergency to give primacy to the needs of the people. Instead they are making the entire nation – with record levels of stunting, malnutrition, poverty and now also hunger – wait for their own tug of war and scramble for resources.
It’s also a hard fact that whichever administration comes to power after the election will have its hands too full with meeting IMF’s “upfront conditions”, whose “structural adjustment” harshness will make things worse for the average Joe before anything can get better, to give social indicators an immediate facelift.
One can only hope that the political lot will finally call a huddle, after the dust from the election has settled, and together impress upon the Fund that the bailout money must first feed the lower classes.
But if there’s no collective change of attitude at the very top, then findings like GHI’s will only go down in history as the last desperate red flags that the government did not pay appropriate attention to. This typifies Pakistan’s biggest tragedy; GHI warning about hunger, World Bank hollering about stunting, IMF saving the economy, etc., with the people’s elected representatives too busy watching out for themselves to give anything or anyone else much thought.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023