Articles of September 2009

Last year's food crisis memories are still fresh in Pakistan. It so happened when Pakistan, a food producing country, could not escape the food crisis looming across the globe. The Pakistan Army was deployed to avoid the seizure of food from fields and warehouses. Since then, the food prices have been increasing throughout the world including Pakistan. At that time, the new government was blamed for not managing the countries food accumulations properly. Apart from Pakistan, many countries were badly hit by food crisis including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Senegal, Mauritania, Cote d'Ivoire, Egypt Mexico, Bolivia, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Morocco.

It is astonishing to note that nearly a sixth of the world population is undernourished today. Goes without saying, the millennium development goal of halving starvation by 2015, will never be achieved. The food prices are soaring because food stocks are not keeping pace with population growth. This observable fact has made food increasingly too expensive for an increasing number of the population that lives below the poverty line in developing countries. There are several factors that played their roles in soaring food prices; the role of governments remained very poor by the time. Their wrong policies aggravated the situation.

In Pakistan, we could not perform well on the front of food security as compared to the performance of other developing countries. Not less than half of our total population is able to sustain their food intake now. Malnutrition is on the rise despite the fact food grain production in