Despite sub­si­dies to keep costs in con­trol for buy­ers, food prices in Pak­istan are ris­ing again. The price for a bag of flour is above what most peo­ple earn in a day. The Inter­na­tional Food Pol­icy Research Insti­tute say this is one of the rea­sons why hunger rates in Pak­istan are alarming.

From the IRIN, we read more about food prices and hunger in Pakistan.

Razia, a widow from Lahore, looks after three daugh­ters under 15 on a monthly income of Rs 5,000 (about US$60) earned by wash­ing clothes, and like many oth­ers she is find­ing it increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to feed her family.

Last month, dur­ing Ramadan, she could buy a sub­si­dized 10kg sack of flour at Rs 175 ($2), but prices have now returned to their pre-Ramadan level of Rs 550 ($6.6) per 20kg bag. Other items sold at sub­si­dized rates for Ramadan are also up, she said.

“I bought sugar at Rs 50 [60 US cents] a kilo­gram from gov­ern­ment util­ity stores last month. Now I pay Rs 60 or more,” Razia told IRIN. Like most fam­i­lies, sugar is an essen­tial item for her house­hold. “We use it for tea, and with­out sweet tea it is hard to get through the day,” she said.

Tak­ing note of the hard­ship caused by soar­ing sugar prices, Pakistan’s Supreme Court, has ordered sugar to be sold at Rs 40 [48 US cents] a kilo­gram pend­ing a deci­sion on the mat­ter by a spe­cial commission.

“This is a good move by the court. It may offer some relief. Already, because flour is so expen­sive, we eat less,” said Nazeer Ahmed, 60, a rick­shaw dri­ver, adding: “All of us, includ­ing my three chil­dren, some­times go to bed with just a mouth­ful of bread and pickles.”

“Food items are cost­lier, so peo­ple are buy­ing less. For exam­ple, a dozen eggs which cost around Rs 35 last year, cost Rs 60 this year,” Man­zoor Abbas, a shop­keeper at a Lahore mar­ket, told IRIN.

“Alarm­ing”

Accord­ing to the Washington-based Inter­na­tional Food Pol­icy Research Insti­tute, lev­els of hunger in Pak­istan are “alarming”.

A recent inci­dent in Karachi is illus­tra­tive of people’s des­per­a­tion: Twenty women and girls, who had gone with hun­dreds of oth­ers to take advan­tage of free flour being dis­trib­uted by a shop­keeper, died in a stampede.

The government’s Con­sumer Price Index (CPI) showed prices in July and August were up 10.93 per­cent on the same period last year. Annual food infla­tion at the end of August was 10.59 per­cent, accord­ing to the CPI, and per­ish­able items had gone up 17.27 percent.

Cor­rup­tion?

There is also a debate about how many peo­ple ben­e­fited from sub­si­dized food schemes dur­ing Ramadan. “Hardly 25–30 per­cent of the tar­geted pop­u­la­tion in Sindh Province was able to ben­e­fit from the cheap flour scheme, because there was a lot of cor­rup­tion and mis­man­age­ment,” Muham­mad Yousuf, chair­man of the Pak­istan Flour Mills Asso­ci­a­tion in the south­ern province, told the media in Karachi.

“Mea­sures to pro­vide relief to the poor by sup­ply­ing food items… free or at con­ces­sional rates, are good as responses to unfore­seen dis­as­ters… [but] they can­not be rec­om­mended as a solu­tion to per­ma­nent prob­lems such as poverty,” said I. A. Rehman, secretary-general of the autonomous Human Rights Com­mis­sion of Pak­istan. New poli­cies were needed to erad­i­cate poverty, avoid anar­chy and offer per­ma­nent solu­tions, he said.

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