The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is trying to break this cycle by tackling poverty through bolstering farming in northern Pakistan.
IFAD’s Economic Transformation Initiative (ETI) is enlarging farmer smallholding sizes. It has established over 160 cooperatives for more than 40,000 farmers.
Cooperatives are crucial to farmers’ development. Sharing grain stores lowers costs, while greater collective output enables farmers to negotiate better prices.
Cooperatives help farmers access better information, finance and markets. These benefits can increase returns and production.
The ETI has also embarked on a massive infrastructure project. Across the mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan, IFAD has built over 430 km of irrigation channels and 380 km of farm to market roads. “It is a huge and herculean task,” says IFAD’s Khadim Saleem, who coordinates the ETI project.
Pakistan’s government is leading efforts to break the hunger cycle in the region and nationally.
Mohammad Abbas, project director at the department of health in Gilgit-Baltistan, refers to the government’s national cash transfer scheme, known as the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), among others.
Launched in 2008, the monthly cash vouchers of between $15 and $20 are sustaining some of Pakistan’s poorest.
The scheme is working: between 2011 and 2019, the percentage of BISP beneficiaries below the poverty line fell from 90 to 72 per cent, according to a World Bank evaluation published this year.
Prosperity begins with the food we eat
Yet while the BISP has succeeded in tackling poverty in this northern region, the programme is quite a blunt instrument; more targeted interventions are also required.
In a treatment room of the health clinic in Immit, Gulsherran Mohdsadik is slipping a measuring tape around Urwa Hussain’s left arm.
Gulsherran positions the four-year-old girl on some scales. She then measures her height and the data is recorded in a book.
Gulsherran is supporting Urwa as part of the Aga Khan Development Network’s (AKDN) Central Asia Stunting Initiative (Casi).
Three years ago, Urwa was stunted. Luckily, however, she was on the Casi books.
The Casi team educated her parents on breastfeeding techniques, complementary feeding, dietary diversity and hygiene. They provided a nutritional supplement called Ronaq for a full year and monitored her growth each month.
Over the past three years, her height and weight reached the average centile for her age. Today, she is thriving.