The Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Food Programme have done well to alert governments on the occasion of World Food Day about the alarming rise of hunger on a global level. One billion people, nearly a sixth of the world population, are undernourished today. At this rate the millennium development goal of halving starvation by 2015 will never be achieved.

As can be expected, the food crisis that has been exacerbated by the economic downturn is hitting the poor the hardest. The tragedy is that falling food production is not the core problem: prices are rising because food stocks are not keeping pace with population growth. This phenomenon has made food increasingly unaffordable for a growing chunk of the population that lives below the poverty line in developing countries. It is a pity that food security has suffered primarily because of the wrong policies of governments, both the aid givers and the agricultural economies. They are not investing sufficiently in agriculture which is now considered to be a sector that is not so lucrative in an age where money and the market rule the roost. With ‘subsidy’ going out of fashion and no social security net provided to the poor, starvation is inevitable.

At home we have cut a sorry figure for partially different reasons. Malnutrition is on the rise because people have had to cut down on their food intake. But the irony is that since the year 2000 food grain production in Pakistan has grown by nearly 25 per cent, which is more than the population growth rate. Yet we are not being able to feed our people. Ill-conceived food distribution strategies, a perceptible thrust towards cartelisation due to avarice and the abuse of the Afghan transit trade agreement to facilitate smuggling through porous borders have allowed commercial interests to exploit the situation to their advantage. Strangely, the government has shown a brazen lack of political will to act against these unscrupulous elements in an environment where the playing field is not level and where the free market has escaped regulatory mechanisms.