WITH the month of fasting just days away, most households across the country are opening up their purse strings to stock up on food essentials and the expense of Eid that will come later. Unfortunately, many unethical traders and shopkeepers make it their business during this month of high demand to jack up prices. This is the time that the government needs to start putting monitoring teams out on the roads to check for hoarding, profiteering and the adulteration of food items that has become a regrettably common feature at this time of the Islamic year. Clamping down on these practices is in any case the responsibility of the state, but special effort needs to be made at times such as these when consumption patterns alter in a way that allows unscrupulous parties to benefit.

The sad reality is that it is the poor that will suffer the most, stalked as they are already by hunger and malnutrition. The prices of dietary essentials have risen steadily over the years, so that now there are estimates that nearly two-thirds of the population spends between 50pc to 70pc of its income on food alone. And even then, most people say that they are not eating the same food they were earlier because those items have become too expensive. In 2012, the Ministry of National Food Security and Research said that about 50pc of the country’s population was food insecure, and international bodies such as Unicef have pointed out the alarming rates of malnutrition. The government may be bogged down in various crises that it considers more pressing, but here’s the bottom line: all other efforts fail if the population doesn’t have access to food, and sufficient quantities of it. The advent of the month of fasting should be taken as a clarion call to efficiently monitor and regulate food prices, as well as to expand the system of food subsidies — such as the utility stores.

Published in Dawn, June 23rd , 2014