The State of Food Security in Pakistan: Future Challenges and Coping Strategies

Pakistan is a low-income developing country and agriculture is its most important sector due to its primary commitment of providing healthy food to her fast-growing population. The total cultivated area has increased by just 40 percent during the past 60 years, while there has been more than a four-times increase in population and a seven-fold urban expansion resulting in mega cities as well as a rising population pressure on cultivated land. Although the production of wheat, which is a major food crop, has increased five-fold during the same period, yet the country is a marginal importer of wheat. Reducing poverty, hunger, and food insecurity are essential parts of the Millennium Development Goals. The paper refers these and highlights the implications of the government’s current food security policies—on the one hand, the government’s wheat-centred food policy is heavily costing the national exchequer, and on the other, urban consumers are subsidised at the expense of farmers, which wheat millers are absorbing almost all the subsidy provided by the government to implement the wheat policy. Much effort is needed to narrow the gap between population growth and domestic food production. Managing food security in Pakistan requires an understanding of how agricultural policies affect food supply and income, and the poor and the vulnerable in the rural and urban areas, and how this burden is transferred to the other sectors. The main focus of this paper is to find the pathways to achieve food and nutritional security for a growing population in Pakistan.