Global peace, prosperity tied to availability of affordable food

Lahore: World is entering into a new era of food insecurity which is to pose serious threat to the global peace and prosperity, a business leader said Wednesday.

Global community need to join hands and take immediate steps to ward off the looming threat, said President Pakistan Businessmen and Intellectuals Forum (PBIF) and former provincial minister Mian Zahid Hussain.

Speaking to the businessmen, he said that the emerging danger has nothing to do with the availability of food but its price which has gone out of the reach of almost a billion people.

He said that presently around 850 million or 11 percent of the global population has been facing food insecurity of which majority lives in Saarc region.

Moreover, two billion people including 320 million children are not getting proper diet; every second pregnant women in the developing world and 40 percent pre-school children are anemic while 45 percent child mortality has been attributed to deficiency of vitamins and minerals, he informed.

Mian Zahid Hussain said that once Indian subcontinent used to produce half of the world’s GDB but now it is home to majority of world’s poor due to continued political tensions. These poor are compromising on health, education and other necessities to buy food.

Eradication of poverty and malnutrition is in the interest of developed world — home to majority of one billion excessively fat people — they support poor countries to ensure food security by cooperating in the fields of agriculture, energy, nutrition, clean drinking water, sanitation, and access.

The veteran business leader said that hunger and associated health as well as productivity costs has been bringing down global GDP to five percent. Governments need to increased intervention in the agricultural sector and grain markets as peace and prosperity cannot be ensured in presence of starving population.

He asked the international community to stop India from stealing Pakistan’s water and put an end to conspiracies to turn Pakistan into a desert. Lauding the government efforts to connect farms to cities through roads he demanded speeding up the process.