I have spent much of my time in Pakistan over the past few months and have been deeply concerned by signs that an unheralded food emergency is under way. Evidence of rising prices is easier to find, of course (see my previous posts), but what is less clear is exactly what impact the resource crunch is having on the diets of the poor.
Back in November, at the Pakistan Development Forum, the redoubtable Shahnaz Wazir Ali, Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on the Social Sectors (a Cabinet post), presented alarming figures suggesting that per capita caloric intake had dropped to 1650 cal/d, with a quarter of the population malnourished. I haven’t yet managed to track down the source of her data or the basis on which it is calculated, but FAO figures put the average in 2007 for least developed countries at 2157 cal/d.
In the media this morning, there are reports confirming that – in rural Sindh at least – a growing number of people are now starving:
Pakistan’s Sindh province, hit hard by last year’s floods, is suffering levels of malnutrition almost as critical as Chad and Niger, with hundreds of thousands of children at risk, Unicef said on Wednesday.
A survey conducted by the provincial government and the UN Children’s Fund revealed malnutrition rates of 23.1 per cent in northern Sindh and 21.2 per cent in the south.
Those rates are above the 15 per cent emergency threshold set by the World Health Organisation and are on a par with some of the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Northern Sindh also had a 6.1 per cent severe acute malnutrition rate and southern Sindh had 2.9 per cent, both far above the WHO thresholds.
“We are looking at hundreds of thousands of children at risk,” Unicef chief of communication Kristen Elsby told Reuters
It’s good to hear Unicef ringing the alarm – and Ms Wazir Ali is a powerful advocate in government for the plight of the poor – but this silent emergency provides yet more evidence of how poorly equipped national governments and the international system are even to understand what is happening as the pressure of resource scarcity ratchets up.
Time for someone to join up the dots, I think.
