The document discusses challenges to food security in Pakistan. It outlines three pillars of food security - availability, access, and use - and analyzes issues within Pakistan's agricultural system that threaten these pillars. Key issues include water deficit from over-pumping of groundwater and inefficient canal irrigation, preference of cash crops over staple foods, land degradation, and failure to recover saline lands for agriculture. Addressing these long-standing problems through modernized practices, awareness, and policy changes could help Pakistan achieve food self-sufficiency.

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Article: Food Security & Pakistan
Author: Tufail Ali Zubedi
Email: Zubeditufail@yahoo.com
Author brief: the writer is an environmental consultants working for sustainable development since
2004.
Dated: 2013-05-19
Food Security & Pakistan
The World Food Summit of 1996 has defined food security as existing “when all people at all times have
access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life”. The World Food
Summit‘s definition includes both physical and economic access to food that meets people's dietary
needs as well as their food preferences1
.
Food security is built on three pillars2
:
 Food availability on consistent basis.
 Food access of sufficient resources to obtain nutritious diet.
 Food use based on basic nutritional knowledge.
Food security and its underlining concepts of Food Availability, Food Access and Food Use in Pakistan
remain decades long challenge to overcome considering its own population growth, Afghan-Soviet war
displaced refugees, inefficient agricultural, Fishing & Cattle Farming practices and Floods. This article
mostly deals with the norms and challenges of agricultural practices of Pakistan and most humbly
excludes the socio-political issues threatening Pakistan’s Food Security. This article also excludes debate
on issues of fish yield, cattle farming and food available from these sources.
Agriculture remains the largest employment sector in Pakistan and the most critical factor to its food
security and looks into the following challenging issues in Pakistan.
 Water Deficit
 Inefficient Agricultural Practices
 Preference of cash crop over staple food,
 Land degradation and changes in use pattern
 Failure to recover saline lands for agricultural purposes,
Water Deficit:
Pakistan is in a constant fix with its neighbor over diversion of its rightful water shares and in addition to
this, Pakistan receives 12-18 rain days per year. Farmers have relied not only on the extraction of ground
water through heavy duty ground water pumps. As a result of this, Water table has steadily declined in
the previous years as basin recharge due to heavy pumping, is not enough.
Another highly prevalent method is the use of canal and channel irrigation water. It is quite unfortunate
to write that a majority of such channels are not properly lined and as a result water lost in transition is
more than the actual water received at the tail-end of any such channel. A yearly desiltation program is

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carried out but there are just a few farmers who benefit out of it. Uncontrolled water supplied to
agricultural lands especially in areas with unlined channels results in rise of water table and water
logging of land.
On a holistic view, all this deficit of water in the agriculture cycle will result in shortage of grain harvest
in the coming years.
Inefficient Agricultural Practices
Clearly our farmers still carry out their farming endeavors through the centuries old traditions and
knowledge passed on from father to son to grandson. Even today fertilizer spraying is done manually.
There is no awareness of maintaining a natural slope of land to allow water flow by gravity and watering
of crops is still done by water flooding method when drip irrigation may be adopted for areas with less
available water.
Much needs to be learnt and taken up by our farmers and academicians alike to create awareness on
modern agricultural practices leading to more yield per unit hectare.
The story of making agriculture does not end with the farmers and the academicians. The greatest need
of the time is to modernize Land Revenue Departments and Irrigation Departments to use modern day
technologies such as Geographical Information System for recordkeeping and Management Information
System, SCADA systems for water conveyance and losses monitoring etc. All efforts made by farmers
would be futile until and unless the people responsible of collecting revenue and policy-making are not
made aware of modern day “productivity enhancement and energy efficient” agricultural practices.
Preference of cash crop over staple food
Framers have generally switched to cash crops such as cotton, sugarcane, Jatropha, fruits over non-cash
crops such as wheat, beans etc. The underlying concept, generally prevailing in the farmer community, is
to acquire wealth and with that wealth purchase non-cash crops or grow one’s own non-cash staple food
on a very small percentage of land. This concept in its absolute terms may result in economic benefits of
the farmer individually and collectively as a community. However this concept on a bigger scale would
seriously result in the shortfall of food. This shortfall phenomenon is evident in the form of wheat flour
shortages in the months of February to March.
Land degradation and changes in use pattern
Land degradation is another important aspect in Pakistan that will play a pivotal role in food security.
Agricultural lands are constantly overburden for their mineral contents and fertility. In order to produce
“Bumper Crop” and have a high yield per hectare of a specific crop, farmers are ever-increasingly making
use of more and more fertilizers against the natural cycle achieved by crop rotation on the same piece of
land.
This results in leaching of mineral contents and reducing of agricultural land fertility. Once this start and
in the years following, farmers make use of more and more fertilizer spraying to increase soil fertility
and further aggravating the problem.

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Changes in Land use pattern is an important factor that people use in favors of short term economic
gains instead of food security. Farmers, being unable to make their pleas heard at the doors of policy
makers, are forced to sell their lands to real estate builders who in turn change these lands to shopping
plazas and luxury apartments. Examples of work of such real estate builders may be seen while
travelling on the National highway around the city of Hyderabad. Karachi has already been turned into a
megapolis city.
Failure to recover saline lands for agricultural purposes,
For years much has been written to recover saline lands for agricultural purposes or by the use of salt
tolerant crop species. Pakistan having one of the largest networks of irrigation and having eco-zones
suitable for most types of crops still imports wheat and sugar due to its shortfall.
Perhaps with the right type of bank financing with softer markup rates, awareness, use of modern
technology, market regulation and incentives for agricultural land recovery, Pakistan can be on its road
to Food Self-Sufficiency.
1
http://www.who.int/trade/glossary/story028/en/
2
http://www.who.int/trade/glossary/story028/en/