With hunger on the menu, Pakistan will tumble
It was during prime time on one of Pakistan’s most popular news shows a few days ago, when a short clip shocked most of those watching, apparently even Prime Minister Imran Khan and his cabinet of federal ministers. In the video, a distraught man in Quetta in Pakistan’s southwest Balochistan province, purchases half a ‘roti’ for Rs.10 ($0.063) from a tandoor – a common public oven that converts wheat flour into flat bread roti, a food staple for tens of millions in Pakistan every day. It had been a fortnight since gas prices were increased, forcing hundreds of thousands of tandoors to almost double the price of roti, and making it suddenly too expensive at an average of Rs. 20 a piece.
Already, angry protests had erupted against the hike in the price of roti, but the powerful video clip was the last proverbial straw, showing Pakistan’s poorest people forced to halve their already meagre daily food intake.
What is abundantly clear is that runaway price hikes and record inflation on the back of a tanking economy, which is becoming the signature characteristic of the Khan government, are putting tens of millions of Pakistanis at risk of transiting from hunger to starvation.
Adnan Rehmat
Within days, the cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister had ordered a reversal of gas price hikes for tandoors across Pakistan. Whether this actually happens will be apparent over the next few weeks because the implementation of the order lies with provincial administrations, which are not exactly known for strong regulatory performances.
What is abundantly clear is that runaway price hikes and record inflation on the back of a tanking economy, which is becoming the signature characteristic of the Khan government, are putting tens of millions of Pakistanis at risk of transiting from hunger to starvation.
The government’s own statistics indicate as much. In its latest report last month, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) revealed that nearly 40 percent of Pakistanis and over 50 percent of people in the most under-developed province of Balochistan sleep hungry every night, missing at least one of the day’s average three meals.
Translated into actual numbers, this means close to 85 million of 210 million Pakistanis remain hungry every day. This is shocking for a country that boasts one of the world’s only seven nuclear arsenals armed with sophisticated native intercontinental missile development and deployment capabilities.
Pakistan is failing its citizens; the state is simply not prioritizing the welfare of its subjects through a focus on fundamentals such as food security, health and education.
A World Bank and UN-praised social security scheme, the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP), launched a decade ago by Bilawal Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party and continued by Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N and even Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf, provides small cash handouts every month to 4.7 million of the identified 7.7 million of Pakistan’s most chronically poor. But that’s just a drop in the ocean – despite the Rs 700 billion spent by BISP in the last decade – considering the SBP statistics. Khan himself is currently championing his new Ehsaas Program that seeks to offer small loans for entrepreneurial initiatives to help poor families sustain themselves, but again it is simply not adequate.
The failure of Pakistan to take care of its citizens cannot be reversed if three things don’t happen. The first is for the political parties to agree on a charter of economy that can prioritize economic growth and business friendly policies, and enable them to offer sustainable support for improving economic fundamentals by shielding them from their otherwise polarizing politics. Pakistan’s current zero-sum politics precludes this. There has been talk in recent years about a charter on the economy, but despite willingness by PPP and PML-N to support PTI, Khan, who practices bruising and zero-tolerance politics, is not game for it yet. No wonder, the government’s own Federal Bureau of Statistics confirmed last week that inflation is now the highest in six years on the back of the lowest economic growth in two decades.
The second thing that must happen is restructuring Pakistan’s overtly centralized state from its unwieldy, nearly ungovernable massive four provinces and two other non-provincial territories to between 15 and 20 provinces. Without deepening decentralization, efficient self-governance can’t happen, and the federal government can’t free itself up from needless parallel governance to instead a necessarily robust facilitation and supportive role.
Thirdly, Pakistan with its runaway population – estimated to hit 400 million when the country turns 100 years old in 2047 – must choose between social development to become a high-middle income country or continue remaining a security state whose appetite for growing budgets is forcing people to go hungry. Hungry people are angry people and the state will not survive or stay normative for long if their fundamental constitutional rights are not ensured.
For this to happen, Pakistan's political classes must end their needless polarization and instead engage the security establishment to jointly devise a functional roadmap for guaranteeing human security and development as a means of ensuring military security. Pakistan has pursued the reverse and failed miserably. Pursuing a human development agenda is the only route now to Pakistan’s prosperity. The alternative is frightening.
