THE finance minister acknowledged the widespread incidence of malnutrition in Pakistan the other day, but missed the point in presenting remedies for the problem. The annual report of the National Economic Council, placed before the National Assembly by Mr Ishaq Dar, says that one out of three Pakistanis `does not have regular and assured access to sufficient nutritious food`. The words in which the problem is identified immediately betray a lack of awareness about malnutrition and how to study its incidence.

The report goes on to suggest that the `poor performance of the agriculture sector in recent years` is responsible for this situation, and that the remedy must, therefore, be in making agriculture growth more `pro-poor`, that is by diversifying the base of incomes and creating more linkages between the farm and non-farm sectors.

If the authors of the report had studied the literature on malnutrition in Pakistan, they would have realised that increasing the supply of food, or producing greater rural incomes will have only a marginal effect on nutritional outcomes. The latter are more closely linked to social variables such as female education. They could have taken, as an example, a report published in the Lancet Series on Maternal and Child Nutrition in Pakistan in 2013, which found that half of all children in this country are chronically undernourished, and a quarter of all children are born underweight. These are staggering numbers, and the vulnerabilities they create to disease aggravates the problem further. In a list of remedies required to arrest the growth of these numbers, the authors had mentioned steps such as marrying girls at a later age, greater awareness of prenatal health, improved health programmes to give women access to trained birth attendants, targeted safety nets in rural areas, empowerment of women, early childhood development programmes, and so on. Malnutrition can occur widely even in areas of food abundance, and should not be just linked to incomes. By taking such a narrow economic view of malnutrition in Pakistan, the finance minister has revealed a poor understanding of the problem, and has gone on to identify a flawed set of policies as the remedy. When the Lancet study was launched back in 2013, the Planning Commission was represented at the event, and promised that its findings would be incorporated in Vision 2025 to guide the government`s approach to long-standing problems. Sadly, this does not appear to have happened.