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| Just in time for the upcoming planting season, the European Union (EU) has taken a major step to turn the tide of rising hunger in Pakistan.
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Partnering with the Food and Agricultutre Organisation (FAO), it distributed quality seed and fertiliser to around 100,000 farmers, hit hard by last year’s food price hikes.
An FAO press release states soaring food prices pushed a further 10 million Pakistanis into the ranks of the hungry, taking the total number to an estimated 46 million, or 28 per cent of the population, according to a UN assessment report published in July 2008.
There were 36 million hungry people in Pakistan in 2004-06, according to FAO statistics. The country has become a priority for the one-billion-euro European Union Food Facility (EUFF), the bloc’s response to increased food insecurity around the world.
“When this crisis hit, we worked hard to get a big slice for Pakistan,” says Hans de Kok, the EU’s Ambassador to Pakistan. “Now, this country is the biggest beneficiary of the food facility, partly because it suffered badly and partly because of some of the difficulties the country is going through, not just in farming, but also in security and economically.”
In Pakistan, the EU works with the FAO and World Food Programme (WFP), funding a 40-million-euro operation through June 2011.
While the WFP is providing food assistance to nearly 600,000 farmers and labourers, the FAO helps small-scale farmers increase their production, with the overarching aim of making more food available for over one million of the country’s most vulnerable.
Based on conservative estimates, the FAO’s assistance during the coming four cropping seasons will lead to an added production of at least 114,000 tons of wheat, 4,750 tons of rice and 14,250 tons of assorted crops, including vegetables and lentils.
Ahead of the start of Rabi planting season in November, 97,500 farmers received agriculture inputs. These included 1,865 tons of seeds for wheat, tomatoes, lentils, peas and others as well as 3,420 tons of fertiliser.
Paradoxically, this support comes when Pakistan has just produced a bumper crop of 24 million tons of wheat, two million tons above its requirement. Yet prices remain stubbornly high, especially in rural areas, where the most food-insecure people live. Food may be there, but for many it is too expensive to buy.
Furthermore, explains Gamal Ahmed, FAO’s representative in Pakistan, most of the rural population is made up of smallholder farmers, who face increasing difficulties to live off the land.
“They can’t grow enough for themselves because prices of inputs have gone up too,” he says. “That’s why we focus on providing them with seeds and fertiliser.”
But Pakistan’s small farmers need more than inputs alone. “If you ask an ordinary farmer what’s your problem? He will say immediately quality seeds and fertiliser, water and extension,” says Imran Ashraf, the EU’s Development Adviser in Pakistan.
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