Food Security Must Top All Govt Priorities

The words still echo. Prof M S Swaminathan once wrote: "If agriculture goes wrong, nothing else will have a chance to go right in this country." Considering that agriculture is the backbone, what the father of the Green Revolution implied was the need to ensure food security without any ecological harm.

Nowhere does food security become a litmus test unless war clouds begin to gather. As tension escalates between the two neighbours, the confidence with which India is retaliating against the air attacks stems also from a comfortable food situation back home. Given a record harvest in the 2024-25 marketing season, and with predictions of a bountiful monsoon season ahead, India has nothing to fear on the food front.

But it isn't so for Pakistan. Faced with quite a shortfall anticipated in domestic food availability, an outcome of policy flaws, climate aberrations, and economic constraints, Pakistan has a food security disaster waiting to happen. As per reports, with domestic prices of wheat soaring from PKR 70/kg for wheat a few years ago, the prices for the staple food are operating in the range of PKR 400 to 450/kg at present. As tension escalates on the borders, the worry among policymakers who are looking to import anything between three to five million tonnes of wheat in the coming months is growing. Given the economic constraints, and knowing that an impending war is a huge drain on the economic resources, ensuring food security for a restive population is a double whammy.

In a very well-explained article by Raja Muneeb in First Post (April 9, 2025), he writes: "Between 2021 and 2024, Pakistan witnessed an unprecedented surge in retail wheat prices, reflecting deep-rooted instability in the country's agricultural supply chain and broader economic pressures. In 2021, wheat was available at approximately PKR 70 per kilogram. By 2022, this rose sharply to PKR 100 per kilogram, marking a 30 per cent increase. The trend worsened in 2023, with prices soaring to PKR 170 per kilogram, an alarming 70 per cent spike in just one year. However, 2024 brought the most dramatic escalation yet, as retail prices skyrocketed to between PKR 400 and PKR 450 per kilogram, representing a staggering 135 per cent jump. This four-year spiral has placed immense strain on household food budgets, pushing wheat a dietary staple out of reach for millions of Pakistanis and amplifying nationwide food insecurity."

Subsequently, Pakistan faced food riots in many places in mid-2024.

The supply shocks coming from the Russia-Ukraine war have further added to the supply chain disruptions. Anyway, talking about Ukraine, the continuing war against Russia has shown how the Central Asian economy has remained dependent on the need to acquire more weapons. The more than comfortable food situation back home has ensured that Ukraine was food secure. It didn't have to go around with a begging bowl while the war raged on. In any case, Ukraine is the world's third-biggest exporter of maize, the fifth-largest exporter of wheat and barley, and the top exporter of soybean oil. With Russia already taking control of 22 per cent of Ukraine's farmlands in 2022, any further ceasefire would mean the diversion of a significant proportion of Ukraine's farmlands to Russia.

Such is the importance of extending control over Ukraine's farmlands that in 2024 Russia's agricultural exports to Africa increased by 19 percent in value terms. It further proposes to increase agricultural exports to 50 per cent in the years to come and also enhance fertiliser production by a third.

Though global food prices had risen in the initial years of the war beginning in 2020, after a steep hike, international prices dipped meaning that speculators had taken advantage of warmongering. This is what Pakistan faced when in 2024 private trade and hoarders accumulated a lot of grain thereby adding to the crisis. Instead of leaving it to markets, the global effort should be to ensure the States step in to tame the prices. It can't be left to supply demand hypothesis which doesn't work to provide fair and equitable prices, both to farmers as well as consumers.

This only shows the critical importance of what Prof Swaminathan had said some years ago (in 2002). The message is loud and clear. Agriculture retains its economic importance, and all efforts should ensure that the gains are not allowed to be frittered away. Not only should every effort be made to ensure the livelihood security of small farmers in a country like India (and for that matter Pakistan), but the neo-liberal ideological thinking to push the farming population to migrate to cities in search of menial jobs is outdated economic thinking and must be resisted. For any country, maintaining domestic food security should remain the priority.

When I say domestic food security should not be bargained for at any cost, I am also including destroying domestic food production by conforming to the conditionalities that the IMF/World Bank enforces by way of bailout packages. In his book 'The Stupid White Mean' well-known filmmaker Michael Moore had very clearly pointed out that every bailout package comes with 140 to 150 conditions that the lenders impose. One such condition is the urgency to do away with a guaranteed price to farmers by way of a Minimum Support Price (MSP).

I agree with what Raja Muneeb wrote in this connection: "The withdrawal of the MSP policy sets off a dangerous chain reaction across Pakistan's agricultural and food systems. At the forefront of the crisis are smallholder farmers, who, in the absence of a guaranteed price floor, become vulnerable to exploitation by middlemen and private traders. These intermediaries often collude to suppress purchase prices, leaving farmers with little choice but to sell their wheat at a loss simply to repay input loans and survive the next cultivation cycle. With the state stepping back, the private sector fills the vacuum, but not in the public's interest. Hoarders and speculative traders seize the opportunity to buy large quantities of wheat post-harvest, storing it until prices rise sharply. This creates an artificial scarcity that fuels price spikes and feeds into a broader inflationary spiral."

While IMF forced Pakistan to withdraw MSP for wheat, Pakistan also needs to ensure that it does not play a double game by joining with the rich countries in World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations to ask India to do away with the Peace Clause that ensures protection for stockholding agricultural commodities required for maintaining nutritional security of the vulnerable populations. If Pakistan had refrained from doing so, it could have successfully challenged the imposition of a flawed policy imperative that hits into any effort to provide farmers with an assured price. Denials notwithstanding, Pakistan must realise how critical was Prof Swaminathan's assertion.

(The author is a noted food policy analyst and an expert on issues related to the agriculture sector. He writes on food, agriculture and hunger)