Starvation in Pakistan

by | Jan 27, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, South Asia

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.

Global poverty fell 30% between 2005 and 2010, says new Brookings analysis

by | Jan 26, 2011 | Economics and development

Over at Brookings, Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz have just published an interesting new paper (pdf) on the state of global poverty. Among its generally upbeat findings:

Between 2005 and 2010, the total number of poor people around the world fell by nearly half a billion people, from over 1.3 billion in 2005 to under 900 million in 2010.

Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history: never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time. Furthermore, the first Millennium Development Goal target – to halve the rate of global poverty by 2015 from its 1990 level – has already been met, approximately three years ago. And based on our projections, by 2015, we will not only have halved the global poverty rate, but will have halved it again.

The authors also find that from 2005 to 2015, “Asia’s share of global poverty is expected to fall from two-thirds to one-third, while Africa’s share more than doubles from 28 to 60 percent” (though they also note that Sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty rate has now fallen below 50 percent for the first time, and should fall below 40 percent by 2015—something China didn’t manage until the mid-90s).

The immediate thought that occurred to me was: if poverty becomes increasingly concentrated in Africa, does that contradict Andy Sumner’s findings about poverty being increasingly concentrated in middle income countries? Answer: no. In fact, the authors say explicitly that their analysis verifies Andy’s findings. But they also add that 2009 marked a low point for concentration of poverty in low income countries (with 33.4% of poor people living in them) – and foresee a gradual rise back up to 44.9% of poor people living in LICs by 2015 (see graph below).

(Wondering what the hell happened in 2007? India graduated to Middle Income Country status.)