Pakistan is endowed with farm potentials to produce all types of food and non-food crops. Due to this we have enough food production and adequate food security,yet malnutrition continues to be one of the serious problems. The per capita availability of calories has improved from 2078 calories in 1949-50 to 2706 calories in 2000-2001.

Food security is recognized worldwide as a basic national requirement. Despite the fact that in the last decade, global community had focused its attention on the agriculture, specially on food products but the problem of food insecurity continues to exist, rather the gap has increased particularly in the developing countries. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that about 830 million (792 million people in the developing and the least developed countries, and 30 million in the transition countries and 8 million in the developed countries) are suffering from under-nutrition or chronic food insecurity. Some two billion people are anaemic because of iron deficiency, while between 100 to 140 million children suffer from Vitamin A deficiency and another about 740 million are suffering from the disorders related to iodine deficiency. Majority of those undernourished are found in Asia and Pacific (515.2 million).

Food security means different things to different people. There are over 200 definitions of food security in the literature but the most authentic among those is that which was used at the World Food Summit in 1996. According to that definition food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels is achieved when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. The committee on the World Food Security of the FAO defines food security as, “it means that food is available at all times, that all persons have means of access to it, that it is nutritionally adequate in terms of quantity, quality and variety and that is acceptable within the given culture. Only when all these conditions are in place a population can be considered food secure”. The World Bank defines food security as “access by all people at all times to enough food for an active and healthy life”. The concept of trade liberalization in the context of agriculture was first included in the international discussion at the eve of command changing from Gatt to the WTO. Pressure from major agricultural exporting countries in the Cairns group and the concerns of the two major developed trading blocs i.e. the US and the EU put the agriculture into the Uruguay Round. Both the US and the EU overproduced and needed to find markets to dispose off their surplus and to reduce expensive subsidies.

Disagreements between them over agriculture nearly stalled the negotiations in GATT until they reached a compromise agreement on the agriculture (AOA). These two major trading blocs largely thrashed out the AOA and selected the base year and detailed targets so as to benefit them most. Many, if not most, developing countries, including Pakistan, signed up the Uruguay Round without understanding the implications of the agreements for their farmers and food security.

It is assumed that trade liberalization under the WTO regime will increase the food security. Reduction of tariffs and opening of market will make it possible to supply food items at comparatively lower cost because commodities are assumed to be traded on the principle of comparative advantage i.e., the commodities will move from the lower cost point to higher cost point abandoning their production in the higher cost areas. In the existing scenario the agriculture of developing countries, like Pakistan, is characterized with the high cost of production as compared to developed countries. As consumers, poor people being the members of farming community in the developing countries, will be benefited through this mechanism but here we should remember that higher per unit cost in developing countries will deprived them off from their family profession i.e., farming leading them to lower family incomes and making them more vulnerable to food insecurity. Definitely availability of food stuff will be there but whether they will be able to purchase?

Amartya K. Sen, the 1998 Nobel Laureate in Economics, used the idea of entitlements and endowments to explain how a person can have access to food. He said that food availability in the market does not automatically give people access to consume this food. Therefore, individuals or households can have legitimate command over food and other commodities if they have entitlements to “bundles of resources” such as land, capital, technology, skills, stocks, incomes. In many developing countries, those who have no or limited entitlements or endowments such as the landless farmers, fisher folk, rural women, are usually the most vulnerable to hunger and poverty. In Pakistan landless people are 40 per cent of the village community, whereas small farmers are 93 per cent of the farming community with 37 per cent of the total land and the big landlords are only 7 per cent of the farming community but occupy 63 per cent of the total land. So this shows that major factor responsible for inequitable distribution food is the discriminatory access to basic resources.

At the international level, most analysts agree that the global food supplies are more than sufficient to supply everyone with adequate diet if the food is distributed on the basis of nutritional needs. The FAO reports that the world agricultural production today is more than sufficient to feed 6 billion human beings adequately. Cereal production alone, about 2 billion tonnes or 330kg of grain per person/year and representing 3600 kcal per person/day, could, to a large extent, cover the energy needs of the whole population if it were well distributed.

There are many losers and winners in the globalization of agriculture with reference to food production and trade. Losers are the marginal farmers and landless people in the developing countries the livelihood of whom is at stake due to the increased commercialization of agriculture. Winners are the few corporate giants who control the world food and agriculture system. They are the food MNCs that are producing foods which they assure are good for us from the cradle to the grave. Their dominance is shown by the fact that only few MNCs control the production and exports of these food commodities and agriculture-related businesses. There are only three corporations, Chiquita, Del Monte and Dole which control 65-70 per cent of world banana exports, only two companies which control the distribution of 80 per cent of world grain, three corporations which control 85 per cent of tea trade, 10 companies which corner 80 per cent of sales of pesticides and five seed companies namely Monsanto, Novartis and Zeneca, Aventis, and Dupont virtually control 100 per cent of the transgenic market and 23 per cent of the global seed market. The new trend, in the international market, is more concentration of market power through the rapid vertical and horizontal integration, mergers and alliances of multinational firms. There are now fewer companies of the developed world but they occupy the lion’s share in the trade of food stuff leaving very less market share for the firms from developing countries.

The WTO agreement on the agriculture has promoted an industrial model of agriculture that has jeopardized food security in developing countries. The AOA had incorporated three broad areas of commitments from member states, namely in market access, domestic support and export subsidies. The underlying objective of this agreement is to correct and prevent the restrictions and distortions in the world agricultural markets.

Increased market access was the hallmark of the free trade agenda. It was aimed at opening of new markets for agricultural exporters. A recent study by the FAO, however, concludes that there have been hardly any changes in the volume of exports. Tariff peaks or in other words high import duties in the developed world continue to block exports from the developing countries. Another UNCTAD/WTO joint study on the post-Uruguay Round tariff environment for the developing countries exports showed that tariffs on products of interest to developing countries remained high. In the EU, in agriculture and fishery product group of the 2,726 tariff line items, 1,273 have tariff peaks whereas in the US, of the 1,779 agricultural and fishery products, 334 or 36.6 per cent face tariff peaks. So the profound slogan of the WTO i.e., to increase opportunities for the developing countries to ensure food security is still a mirage.

The domestic support are government support extended to the agricultural producers for the production of specific products either in monetary terms (direct payments to farmers) or non-monetary (government service programmes such as research, pest and disease control, marketing and promotion services). Domestic support policies are divided into two groups: permitted policies (Policies under the Green Box and Blue Box) and other reduction commitments (Amber Box). Decoupled direct payments associated with the production limiting programmes such as the payments based on fixed area and yields, or the livestock payments based on fixed number of heads are exempted from reduction commitments. So those areas in domestic support which are the concern of developed countries are above the reduction commitment, whereas the developing countries are bound to reduce support to their agriculture. In this environment of discrimination it is very difficult for the farmers of developing countries to stand against the heavily subsidized agriculture sector of the north.

The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Trips) protects and enforces the intellectual property rights (IPRs). The IPRs are protection given to the inventors or the developers that give them exclusive rights over a specific period of time to produce, use or sell an invention, process or new breed of plants. Protection comes in the form of patents, copyrights, trademarks and service marks. The agreement requires members to comply with the substantive provisions of the Paris Convention (1967) and gives 20-year patent protection to all inventions, whether of products or processes, in all fields of technology. Members can protect plant varieties through patents or an effective sui-generi system or a combination thereof. Recently Monsanto, the American giant, has got the patent right over the cross breed of Indian wheat variety (Nap-Hal) with its byproducts and cross breeding. Monsanto now can take legal action against those farmers who will grow wheat with similar traits without the permission of the patent holder. So the farmers from Pakistan and India are at the mercy of Monsanto. Probably, in future, they will not be able to grow the wheat variety which their ancestors used to grow.

So the major challenge faced by Pakistan is to ensure food security by modifying their existing policy focus keeping in view the obligations of the WTO. The possible implications of the WTO agreements on food security situation should be thoroughly worked out. Appropriate strategy should be adopted to ensure a food secure environment on sustainable basis. It requires the maintenance and enhancement of the country’s resource base and of its biodiversity as well as the equitable distribution of these resources. For this we will have to promote the democratic participation of small producers and consumers in policy and decision-making processes. In order to safeguard the interests of small farmers we should adopt an agricultural modernization strategy that promotes diversified and holistic farming systems and recognizes and respects the value of indigenous farming knowledge, techniques and practices with maximum legal protection.