PAKISTAN Pakistan is at risk of a food crisis like countries at war

The FAO and the World Food Program sounded the alert. The long-term effects of last summer’s floods, from which the country has yet to recover, are intertwined with political and financial instability. The lack of foreign currency and the deterioration of purchasing power prevent the population from importing and buying food, instead increasing inflation.

Islamabad () – Pakistan suffers from food insecurity as if it were a country at war due to political instability, economic shocks and as a result of the devastating floods last year, from which the country has not yet recovered.

The latest Hunger Alert report released yesterday by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP) stresses that acute food insecurity will increase in the coming months in 22 countries around the world, most of which are prostrated by conflicts: Burkina Faso, Haiti, Mali, Sudan and South Sudan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen are the nations for which maximum alert has been declared . However, the Central African Republic, the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Pakistan and Syria are also among the countries of great concern, along with Myanmar, ravaged for more than two years by the civil war that followed the coup on 1 February 2021. These are areas where large numbers of acutely food insecure people risk worsening their situation due to political, economic and environmental factors that undermine their living conditions.

Food security is measured according to an index called internationally IPC (Integrated food security phase classification, or integrated classification of the phases of food safety). There are five phases, ranging from general food security to moderate insecurity, through the acute phase, emergency and finally famine.

In Pakistan, the UN collected data from 3 provinces in the country where, between September and December 2022, 6 million people suffered from acute food insecurity and 2.6 million faced an emergency situation in a state of more than 230 million people. population. The UN estimates that conditions will probably worsen by the end of the year due to the political and financial crisis that is reducing the purchasing power of households and, therefore, their ability to buy food. Indeed, Islamabad will have to repay $77.5 billion of external debt by June 2026, a considerable amount considering Pakistan’s GDP was $350 billion in 2021.

Political instability, characterized by a standoff between the army-backed government and former Prime Minister Imran Khan, whose arrest earlier this month sparked violent protests across the country, prevents obtaining a new line of credit from the International Monetary Fund or from the partner countries. Unrest is also expected to increase ahead of the October elections this year as insecurity grows in some areas due to the terrorist threat.

By way of comparison, in neighboring Afghanistan, without further international funding and in economic crisis after the Taliban recapture in August 2021, 15.3 million people are expected to face acute food insecurity between May and October 2023. , while some 2.8 million people will be in an emergency situation.

The shortage of foreign exchange reserves and the depreciation of the currency are reducing the ability to import food, in turn causing inflation to rise and forcing the Pakistani government to impose cuts in energy supply due to fuel shortages. Food product inflation went from 8.3% in October 2021 to 15.3% in March 2022, then to 31.7% in September 2022, and finally reached 35% in December 2022. workers, who earn an average of two dollars a day, lost 30% of their purchasing power.

But at the bottom of this situation are the floods of last summer, which flooded two thirds of the country and caused the death of more than 11 million head of cattle and the destruction of more than 9.4 million acres of cultivated land (nearly 80% of all agricultural land in the country) in the provinces of Balochistan and Sindh, areas already insecure in terms of food availability.

According to the World Bank, food production was disrupted across South Asia due to the monsoons, which were wetter than normal, while rainfall was lower in other areas.