HYPOTHESIS 1:
More than half of the population of Pakistan is food insecure despite
agricultural growth.
The food security of a country is the availability of food in that country, and
the people’s access to it. It is often said, “Food insecurity anywhere,
threatens peace everywhere”.
The term food security reflects the desire to eliminate hunger and malnutrition.
The World Food Summit in 1996 defined food security as, “when all people at all
times have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food
to meet the dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”.
This definition implies that food security has three pillars i.e., physical
availability of food, socio-economic access to food and food absorption.
Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world, with a population now
exceeding 170 million people. We are the 36th largest country of the world area
wise. However, according to a Food Security Risk Index ranking of 148 nations,
Pakistan, ranked 11th on the index, is at “extreme risk”
During 2011-12, the overall performance of agriculture sector exhibited a growth
of 3.1 percent but The conditions for food security are inadequate in 61 percent
districts (80 out of 131districts1) of Pakistan.According to the National
Nutrition Survey 2011 Almost half of the population of Pakistan (58% percent)
doesn’t have access to sufficient food for active and healthy life at all times.
FATA has the highest percentage of food insecure population (67.7 percent)
followed by Balochistan (61.2 percent), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) (56.2 percent).
The lowest percentage of food insecure population (23.6 percent) is in
Islamabad. Among the districts, DeraBugti in Balochistan has the highest
percentage of food insecure people (82.4%). Balochistan has the higher number of
districts with worst conditions for food security. The 20 districts of Pakistan
with worst conditions for food security include 10 districts from Balochistan, 5
from FATA; 3 from KPK, and 1 from GilgitBaltistan (GB) and Sindh each.
Hypothesis 2: Rural people of pakistan are more food insecure and the major
reason is the unequal land distribution.
A study conducted by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) puts
the figure of those living below poverty line in rural areas at over 40 million.
According to PIDE, in the surveys conducted in 2001, 2004 and in 2010, more than
50 per cent of rural households in Punjab and Sindh qualified as
poverty-stricken for at least one period.
Poverty in rural Punjab and Sindh declined sharply from 29.5 per cent in 2001 to
21.8 per cent in 2004 but then jumped to 28 per cent in 2010.
The SDPI study reveals that the rural Balochistan has the highest incidence of
poverty with three-quarters of its rural population (74 per cent) living below
the poverty line. Urban poverty in Balochistan is 29 per cent. The second
highest rural-urban disparity is found in Sindh where 46 per cent rural
households are poor compared to only 20 per cent urban households.
Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa also shows a similar pattern; 43 per cent rural households
are poor compared to 18 per cent urban households. The rural-urban divide in
Punjab is the lowest amongst all the provinces as 28 per cent rural households
are poor in contrast to only 10 per cent urban households.
Although agriculture is at the heart of the rural economy, the majority of
Pakistan’s rural poor are neither tenant farmers nor farm owners. Farmers
(including both owners and tenants) comprised only 43 percent of households
.Non-farm households accounted for slightly more than half (52 percent) of the
households. Overall, agriculture (including both crop and livestock production)
accounts for only about 40 percent of rural household incomes.
unequal landownership in Pakistan is one of the important causes of poverty
since land is the principal asset in an agrarian economy. The landless
households are substantially high in Pakistan. About 67 percent households own
no land . In contrast, about 18.25 percent household own under 5 acres of land
and 9.66 percent household own 5 to 12.5 acres of land, which merely provide
subsistence level of living standards. A very small proportion of households
hold large farm sizes in the country. Strikingly, barely 1 percent (0.64 percent
plus 0.37 percent) households owngreater than 35 acres of land. Thus, highly
unequal land distribution is the main manifestations of poverty in rural
Pakistan.