Malnourished through lack of knowledge

Vast majority of population, food insecure or not, has absolutely no understanding of basic nutritional value of food.

It is now estimated that over 50 per cent of the population of Pakistan lives below the poverty line. The latest figures indicate that this includes 190 million people and even this number is expanding rapidly. Some of these people rarely know where their next meal is coming from and, unsurprisingly, at least 24 per cent of these people are malnourished, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

By any account, these figures should shock the government into action. Yet, nothing serious appears to have been undertaken to alleviate what is a potential disaster in the making — a disaster which is not limited to the rural areas alone but which increasingly affects the poor struggling to survive in deplorable urban conditions, too. This is all thanks to escalating inflation and unemployment.

Once upon a time and not so very long ago, the rural population in the huge agricultural belt of the country enjoyed a reasonably acceptable standard of nutrition. However, over the last 20 years or so, this has slowly dwindled as the mechanisation of many agricultural tasks has resulted in a surge of unemployment with landless labourers being the first to suffer. Residents of mountainous areas have always been seasonally food insecure but as a direct result of environmental degradation and the over-exploitation of natural resources, their struggle for survival is now year-round. Furthermore, it is forcing a growing percentage of them to migrate to urban centres in search of manual work, which is increasingly difficult and often impossible to find.

There is no immediate miracle solution to food insecurity but the number of those afflicted can be reduced if immediate educational and helpful action is undertaken. The problem can be tackled on more than one front with priority being given to teaching people how to produce their own food in even the most extreme circumstances. The Department of Agriculture can, for example, utilise either some of its own vast land holdings or, in urban areas, commandeer vacant plots on which to train food insecure people how to cultivate seasonal crops for their own consumption. The Parks Department can follow suit as a vast majority of rural migrants do not have this knowledge, despite the assumption that they do. And, even if they do, they have neither the land nor the money for the basic seed stocks required to get started.

It is also a shameful fact of life that the vast majority of the population, food insecure or not, has absolutely no understanding of the basic nutritional value of food or of the long-term consequences of eating chemically processed food. Even more worrying is that younger generations increasingly rely on packaged products and fast-foods, all of which are far more expensive than homemade, nutritious foods that they, ridiculously, no longer know how to make.

The introduction of sensible home economics courses to teach students about food preparation and nutrition in all schools and colleges — governmental and otherwise — could go a long way in reducing basic nutritional problems in the future. If lessons in sustainable home food production and seasonal food preservation are also included, then hopefully, the situation will improve over the long term, slowly but surely.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 27^th, 2013.