ISLAMABAD: The National Economic Council has admitted that “one in every three Pakistanis still does not have regular and assured access to sufficient nutritious food”.

In its annual report for the financial year 2013-14, recently presented before the National Assembly by Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, the council blamed the “poor performance of the agriculture sector in recent years” for the situation.

In the report, the council termed the five-year plan (2013-18) as first operational part for implementation of the government’s Vision 2025 which covered targets and performance indicators.

According to Mr Dar, meeting the nutritional needs of people required making agriculture growth more pro-poor.

For that a well-developed non-farm sector was important in order to generate employment, ensure income diversity and reduce poverty.

“Achieving this will require strong linkage between farm and non-farm sectors through promotion of agro-business activities in addition to provision of basic health and education facilities.”

According to the NEC, the only solution to the problem is procurement of wheat under a more rational programme to provide adequate quantities of subsidised wheat or flour to the most food insecure consumers through well-defined and explicitly targeted interventions.

Renowned economist Dr Ashfaque Hasan Khan said the issue was not as simple as explained by the government.

When the government talks about increase in the support price for wheat or other main crops, it means it has no sustainable policy in its mind.

Dr Khan, who had been the government spokesman on economic issues from 1998 to 2009, said successive governments focused their agriculture policies on wheat, rice, cotton and sugarcane crops, which formed only 30 per cent of the value-added agriculture production, by offering support price.

As a result wheat price in the country was 30 to 40pc higher than in the international market.

According to the report, the major challenges which the government was struggling to meet to achieve growth include shortage of energy, security, inadequate supply of water and unavailability of skilled labour.

The economic team led by the finance minister has presented a list of interventions — overcoming the social deficit by setting up a comprehensive social protection system and providing significantly better quality education and health services — to meet the immediate challenges and to ensure that the people of Pakistan have strong stake in the development process for nation building.

The NEC report laid emphasis on redirecting resources to accelerate growth in less developed areas and regions through ideas developed and implemented by them within the plan framework and to reduce disparities in human development.

It called for designing public policy to achieve better distribution of income and wealth and to ensure that incremental incomes were now more evenly distributed than in the past.

The NEC suggested reinventing the role of government at all levels by dispassionately analysing what works and what does not work, so as to accelerate economic development and provide better-quality services.

It emphasised the need for putting in place innovative vehicles for economic development such as public-private partnership as well as strong private sector involvement and making strategic interventions which might help utilise the underutilised natural resource reserves and devise ways to overcome the gaps and imbalances holding back development.

Published in Dawn, December 22nd, 2015