The record rains in Karachi brought the fruit and vegetable business to a standstill almost instantly and kept it frozen for a few days, unleashing an increase of 50 per cent to 100pc in prices afterwards, according to marked surveys reported by the media.

Annualised food inflation measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was in double digits for the second month in August — 11.3pc for urban areas and 13.5pc for rural areas. Higher prices of perishables and higher transportation costs normally push food inflation up.

Federal and provincial authorities need to do something urgently to develop a system for mitigating disruptions in the movement of perishables during rains and flooding. This requires, among other things, a strong political resolve on part of the provinces to hold the local bodies’ elections on time and empower the third tier of government.

Food prices had started rising right from the beginning of this monsoon season in July, disrupting supplies in Karachi owing to the frequent temporary breakdown of logistics. Prices of fruits and vegetables, in particular, skyrocketed in August when Karachi braved the heaviest rainfall (484mm) in 90 years. The reason is that heavy rains and flooding played havoc with the city’s main wholesale market of perishables besides flattening the crops of tomatoes, onions, chilies and other veggies in Sindh and Balochistan and disrupting fruit supplies from Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

There is an urgent need to involve Pakistan Railways in the intra-provincial movement of essential food items, especially perishables

The federal government has constituted a high-level committee headed by Planning and Development Minister Asad Umar to draw up a plan with input from the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and the Sindh government to find a lasting solution to Karachi’s civic problems.

Immediate tasks for this committee as well as for provincial authorities and city administration are to drain out stagnant rainwater from some localities, markets, roads and streets, lift mountains of garbage and improve the sewerage system that collapsed under the pressure of monsoon rains.

How soon and how efficiently these tasks are fulfilled will decide how early and how efficiently the provincial government and Karachi’s administration — or its elected district government after the local bodies’ election — can develop a dependable food supply system. It is necessary to assess rain and flooding–related losses in the infrastructure of Karachi’s main fruit and vegetable market and fix them in the shortest possible time. The current system of food commodities’ supplies to Karachi from rural Sindh and other provinces depends on private transporters. During rains and flooding, they raise fares unreasonably — and as we witnessed during the latest heavy rains — stop working altogether. This pushes up prices of wheat, rice and fruits and vegetables that come to Karachi.

There is, therefore, an urgent need to involve Pakistan Railways in the intra-provincial movement of essential food items, especially perishables, through dedicated goods’ trains. That can help at least in situations where the train service remains intact but goods’ transporters stop running trucks amidst unusually heavy rains.

During the recent heavy rains and flooding, vegetable crops and cotton suffered the worst losses. Reports in the local media suggest that onion, tomato and chilli crops over thousands of acres in rural Sindh and Balochistan have been washed away.

To avoid such supply shocks in the future, it is necessary to promote vertical and indoor farming of veggies in Karachi as well as in other parts of the province. Promoting even tunnel farming of veggies (already in practice in some parts of the province) in Karachi and Hyderabad should also help minimise the disruption of supplies.

This is just one part of a broad allocative efficiency that our provincial and national agricultural policymakers may consider promoting. From the food security’s perspective, the rebalancing of the share of land for cultivation of food and non-food crops has also become necessary. Growing veggies indoor and through vertical farming may free up some cultivable land for the farming of major crops. To ensure the adequate supply of pulses, fringe-farming or the growing of minor crops in and around large fields of key food crops can be helpful. In Punjab, this practice was promoted under the Grow More Pulses programme a few years ago and still continues. Other provinces can follow suit.

To make up for the shortfall in the domestic output, pulses are imported in bulk and are transported first to Karachi’s wholesale markets and then to rural Sindh and other provinces. Traders in Jodia Bazaar cannot store pulses in large quantities for long due to a shortage of proper storage facilities. Under public-private partnership, large steel silos could be installed at designated places across Karachi to ensure the availability of the commodity in emergency situations.

Targeting an improved transportation system and better infrastructure in cities capable of standing harder and longer spells of monsoon rains and urban flooding in the future is a broad and noble objective for overall governance. But to ensure that supplies of fruits and vegetables get minimally affected, the provinces need to put their agriculture house in order, too. The provincial agriculture departments currently remain focused on major crops i.e. cotton, wheat, paddy and sugar cane and take some interest in mangoes, bananas, dates and chilies. But in case of other fruits and vegetables, it does not even bother to collect and release data on time. Nor does it involve their growers in policymaking.

A proper horticulture policy must be designed with the purpose of achieving allocative efficiency. Most importantly, the government must restart the practice of sharing online its projections of both major and minor crops for the next year and their actual output in the last crop year. Currently, the website of the Sindh agriculture department displays “estimates” of some major and minor crops of 2015. —MA

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, September 7th, 2020