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Friday March 29, 2024

What the mirror shows

By Kamila Hyat
September 08, 2016

The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.

We do not always believe what we see. Our governments in fact tend to deliberately ignore reality and concoct for themselves worlds of their own, in which there is a distinct disconnect from the truth.

In one way or the other many of us are misled by the scenes painted up and put on display, hiding the most acute issues and instead replacing them with invented ones. Our media of course, the keepers of the truth in many places, have increasingly lost the ability to put facts before people, to investigate events – in line with a global pattern.

Very few of us would like to admit and perhaps even fewer know        that Pakistan has a larger number of seriously malnutritioned children than Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, DR Congo or Ethiopia taken collectively.

There are also no mega-intervention programmes such as those run in India, in Bangladesh, in Gambia or the Philippines among other countries. The programmes have not eliminated hunger or malnutrition, but they at least show an acknowledgement that it exists and needs to be tackled. At an individual level we do accept the problem, with food charity given out both by households and corporations. But this is simply not enough.

A new report published by the Planning Commission and the World Food Programme noted 67.6 percent of households across the country were unable to supply adequate nutrition to their members. Balochistan, where as many as 83.4 percent households lacked adequate nourishment and Sindh, where the figure stood at 70.8 percent, were, as would be expected, the worst off.

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 67.4 percent of households were unable to supply sufficient food, and even in Punjab this figure stood at 65.6 percent. Additional reports emerging from the study also noted food provided to children was inadequate to meet their needs.

This ties in with previous studies, such as those from Punjab, which show that over 30 percent of children are either too short for their age and another 30 percent too low in weight for their age. Fourteen percent are classified are classified as being acutely malnourished. Experts note that malnourished children, who fail to receive the nutrients they need notably between the age of 0 to 5 years suffer physical weakness and possibly a lack of mental development which affects them through their life. Better nutrition at a later point may be too late to stop this process of damage.

We also know there are particular nutrients that the majority of people across the country receive in too small an amount. Notably in Punjab and KP, iodine deficiency remains a major problem, since mothers are deficient and pass on related health problems to unborn children. Protein, the building block for the body, is also in desperately short supply within many households. It seems obvious then that the problem is a gigantic one, even though it is too rarely discussed in the country or brought up on the television talk shows or other forums that are intended to inform people and build opinion.

In this situation, we should ask whether we are in a position to spend an estimated sum of over $5 million on constructing the controversial Orange Train to run through Lahore as a means to solve the problems of commuters. The same question can be asked about the Rs30 billion metro bus project which now criss-crosses Lahore.

It is absolutely true that transport is badly needed by people. But it is also true that they need food even more than they need transport. It is clearly spelled out in reports compiled by experts that the lack of food is literally killing people or leaving them physically and mentally deficient.

This is surely not a situation we can afford. It has also been observed that when people are underfed, it has a direct impact on the ability of the country to raise its GDP levels, creating a vicious cycle of growing poverty and an inability to escape it.

There is no doubt that we need to place far greater priority on the issue of getting to people the food that they require to survive. The latest figures show the vast majority of people across the country simply do not eat enough to lead healthy, productive lives.

This is especially true of women and children, who often receive the least adequate nutrition. The WFP has also found extremely high malnutrition rates in urban areas of Punjab, despite the fact that income levels in the province are higher than in other parts of the country.

The question that we need to answer is precisely what kind of programme could help the most people most effectively. Charity, even when offered by corporations, is not enough. School feeding programmes could offer one quick solution. A single meal supplied to school going children could help reverse the crisis that we face but refuse to confront.

In the past, efforts to introduce such programmes have been held up by corruption and difficulties in ensuring a safe supply chain of foods that include perishable items such as milk. In some ways, corruption at this level is more damaging than the kind which exists at the higher echelons of the political ladder, though both of course tie in to each other.

What we need most of all is for our politicians to put aside the highly visible grandiose schemes that they choose to put up, claiming that they will benefit billions. It is the most basic of needs that we need to address first of all. If over 67 percent of people in the country have too little to eat, we can hardly hope for a bright future. Indeed, if levels of poverty continue to rise, or distribution of wealth becomes any less uneven as some economists predict it will, we may not have a smaller and smaller workforce which would of course hold us back further.

The crucial issue though is of course one of simple humanity. No state that is unable to feed its people can claim to be a successful one and the statistics that show we have not even adopted measures to deal with the problem suggest our state lacks particularly in compassion or even a pretence of one.

There is no point in fooling ourselves. Too many Pakistanis like to believe we live in a country that is relatively more developed and more prosperous than others in the region or in continents such as Africa. We have developed with extreme success the art of building a false image of ourselves and denying the truth when it is presented before us.

Governments have been guilty of doing precisely this again and again. With the latest figures laid out before us, an anecdotal evidence available everywhere of just how little children eat in a single day, with these amounts falling far short of what they need to grow normally or live healthy lives, we must reconsider where and how we spend our money. We must try to direct it towards projects that can enable people to build better lives and move out of a situation where households, particularly their most vulnerable members, suffer acute hardship because they cannot receive the nutrition they require.

The question of subsidies on food needs to be discussed at the highest levels and other schemes to make food available to people must be put on top place on the national agenda.

Email: kamilahyat@hotmail.com