The United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) including the target to halve the number of hungry people by 2015 remains out of reach at a global level. According to the Food Insecurity Report that was released by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN in 2013, 842 million people are undernourished in 2011-13, or around one in eight people in the world, are estimated to be suffering from chronic hunger, or regularly not getting enough food to conduct an active life.

The report presents updated estimates of undernourishment and progress towards the MDG and World Food Summit (WFS) hunger targets. The latest assessment shows that further progress has been made towards the 2015 MDG target, which remains within reach for the developing regions as a whole, although marked differences across regions persist.

Pakistan is currently facing affordability, availability and quality of food issues to reach about 180 million people every day. The agriculture is facing water-logging and salinity problems, as the system is centuries old.

Recent drought in the Tharparkar and Kohistan region of Sindh and Cholistan in Punjab has proved that Pakistan is a vulnerable country in terms of livelihood issues. Though Pakistan’s food problems are not as severe but issues of governance, corruption and bad administration have further deteriorated the situation. In addition, the country is facing physical water shortages because it has no proper storage facilities. At this stage, the government must give priority to the agriculture sector to reform the century old irrigation system, implement agriculture reforms in the country, improve existing water reservoirs, start work on small carryover dams as well as to tap new underground water resources for the future. Only 4 per cent of total Agriculture Development Program (ADP) on agriculture is not sufficient for a country that is mostly dependent on agriculture. With this in mind, governments must take some appropriate measures as otherwise, the hunger crisis will damage our society and frequent droughts will become the cause of more untimely deaths and social disruption. Pakistan is far behind achieving the MDGs and we are also lagging behind in achieving livelihood targets despite our strong agriculture based economy.

_ The reader is a Pakistani development consultant based in Karachi, Pakistan