The Price of a Roti

Summary

• We add more than four million people a year, which means over half a million additional tonnes of wheat must be found annually just to keep every new citizen’s share unchanged.
• Flour inflation above thirty percent is a genuine emergency, and the daily-wage household that buys bread rather than wheat deserves every release the state can manage.
• Publish the tax content of every input bag, so he can see what the state takes before it decides what it will give; a government serious about food security would discover that cutting the levies on phosphate is cheaper than the wheat imports that nutrient imbalance invites.

AI Generated Summary

On Monday, the Karachi commissioner performed the state’s oldest food security ritual. He notified new prices for bread. A hundred-gram chapati will officially cost Rs16, up from Rs14. Naans are fixed at Rs21, Rs25 and Rs30, according to weight, up from Rs18, Rs21 and Rs27 in February. The notification acknowledged, in its own quiet way, what every household already knows: the actual tandoor charges Rs20 for the chapati and Rs30 to Rs35 for the naan, displays no official list, and keeps no weighing scale. The state has priced the roti. It just has not priced the wheat.

One notification cannot carry the whole of Pakistan’s food security problem, but it diagrams it. We govern the last hundred grams of the chain and abandon the first. Food security is decided at the sowing counter in October, not at the tandoor in April, and Pakistan keeps showing up to the wrong counter.

It is worth pausing on who stands at the right one. Two hundred and fifty million people eat because a few million farmers, most of them working fewer than five acres, most of them on their own land with their own family’s labour, put seed in the ground each autumn without any promise of what it will earn. Wheat supplies close to half the country’s calories, and Pakistan consumes 124 kilograms of it per person, among the highest rates on earth. Last season the farmer produced about 29.6 million tonnes against national consumption of 31.9. No ministry produced that harvest. No committee planted it. It came from men who borrowed at the rates the arhti quoted, absorbed the prices the market dictated, and sowed anyway. Whatever else Pakistan debates about agriculture, this should be said plainly, because it rarely is: the farmer has done his part. Every year, against every incentive, he has done his part.