Mian Mansab rents a small room in a 250-yard house in a hamlet surrounded by the sprawling affluent communities on Raiwind Road in Lahore. He works as a plumber, and his wife helps the people in the surrounding localities keep their homes clean.

Their monthly earnings fluctuate around Rs20,000, and this must cover all their household needs and expenditures, from rent to food to utility bills (that they share with other tenants), to transportation to any emergency expenses.

In the last few years, Mansab has seen a significant surge in the prices of essential goods like food, kerosene oil, and transportation. The family’s income, however, hasn’t risen as quickly, straining his ability to feed his two children. He is one of the millions of people around the country who are much worse off today than they were a year ago, owing to rapidly rising food and fuel prices.

And there is little hope of any improvement in their living conditions any time soon, as economic growth is projected to slow down to less than three per cent this fiscal year, and prices, particularly of food and energy, to soar to new highs.

“We cannot afford to eat more than two meals a day. We do not eat meat for months, and now even vegetables and lentils are becoming harder to afford,” Mansab, 39, tells Dawn.

While a new report suggests that Pakistan is among those developing countries that have slightly cut hunger in the last one year, it continues to be in the company of nations whose hunger conditions are characterised as serious.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI2013), which tracks and measures hunger globally and by country and region, has Pakistan improving its rank amongst the most hungry countries by two places, from 59 to 57.

The GHI, calculated by the Washinton-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), combines three equally weighted indicators in one index number: undernourishment, child underweight, and child mortality.

An economist, who does not want to be identified, is sorry to note that government policies usually do not target the issue of hunger and poverty in the country. Actually, he contends, the official economic policies are depriving the poor of opportunities to get out of poverty.

“The previous government did launch a social protection programme — the Benazir Income Support Programme — to transfer cash to help the poor and the vulnerable cope with the effects of rising food prices. But the sum of money given is too meagre to offset the impact of the rapid food price inflation, let alone help them move out of abject poverty.”

He is of the view that the government must double the cash assistance to the poor. “If we want to help the poor who are considered eligible for cash support, we should substantially increase the money put in their hands to compensate for rising prices,” he insists.

Indeed, Mansab charges more today for the services he provides to keep pace with inflation. But he cannot pass on the full impact of high prices on his household to his customers, like meat sellers or vegetable vendors could do.

“I don’t have a choice but to pay the market price of food and other basic, essential goods, but my customers have the option of calling another plumber who would readily charge considerably less than me,” he says.

Although Pakistan has reduced hunger in the last two decades since 1990 to graduate from the club of countries where hunger is characterised as alarming to the group of nations where it is serious, according to the GHI. Given the fact that the country’s population is projected to double by 2050, the challenge to combat hunger and provide nutritious food to the people becomes even more daunting and urgent.

Surging food prices are causing poverty and hunger to increase, and this is particularly taking a huge toll on the health of families. “My daughter is nine years old but looks like a six-year old. Our only boy, who is seven, can be easily passed off as a five-year old. It is because they don’t eat enough, and what they eat does not fulfill the needs of growing children,” says Mansab.

GHI2013 shows that the proportion of the undernourished in Pakistan as a percentage of the population has come down from 26.4 per cent in 1990 to 19.9 per cent in 2012. The prevalence of underweight in children under five years has reduced from 39 per cent to 30.9 per cent; and the under-five mortality rate has decreased from 12.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent.

“Yet, Pakistan is one of the developing countries where a majority of the world’s hungry live,” says Shahid Zia, a Lahore-based economist. He says people have to sleep on empty stomachs not only because they do not earn enough to be able to buy food, but also because of food shortages in many parts of the country.

“Years of under-investment in agriculture infrastructure and research, water scarcity for smallholders, and climatic changes mean our yields-per-acre are one of the lowest in the world. Also, the area of land under cultivation is shrinking, while the population is growing fast, affecting supply and pushing domestic food prices up. The overall economic conditions — lower growth, job losses, weakening rupee, energy shortages, etc. — have only exacerbated the food price volatility,” he argues.

According to Zia, food prices could stabilise, and even drop, if we increase our per acre output.

“Prices are a matter of supply and demand. If we are able to increase supply, we can control prices. However, this will not be possible without investing significantly huge sums money into agriculture research and development, building damns to store water, improving the irrigation system, building linkages between farms and the market, developing cold chain to prevent waste of perishable items, and so on and so forth,” he contends.

He also agrees that the rise in global food prices affect domestic prices. But he adds that the implications of domestic shortages are more pronounced and wider.

“Without controlling food price volatility in the domestic market, you cannot hope to cut the number of hungry and poor, and increase the access of people like Mansab to enough and nutritious food.” — Nasir Jamal