Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Food and Agriculture, Headlines, Human Rights

PAKISTAN: Soup Kitchens Spring Up to Stave Off Growing Hunger

Zofeen Ebrahim

KARACHI, Nov 16 2009 (IPS) - Until meagre resources began dwindling to almost nothing, 43-year-old Firdaus Begum had not ventured into the Khana Ghar (Food House), which serves up inexpensive but filling meals.

Not too long ago, she finally stepped into the ‘tandoor’ (clay oven where unleavened wheat bread is baked) restaurant and bought meals priced so low they are practically giveaways. She could not have been more grateful to Perween Saeed for her soup kitchen—where food is offered at a very low price.

Saeed—a small, energetic woman now approaching her 50s—has been running her first ‘tandoor’ centre in Taiser Town’s Khuda Ki Basti-3, located some 30 kilometres from the centre of Karachi, for the past six years. She offers meals comprising a bowl or plate of curry or vegetables—depending on what is on the menu on any given day—and two ‘rotis’ (unleavened wheat bread). All these for the price of three Pakistani rupees (less than one U.S. cent).

“I have known about this facility for some time, but I didn’t deserve to buy food from here, thinking it was catering only to the poorest of the poor,” said Begum, who has been looking after her four her daughters alone while trying to earn her keep by taking embroidery orders at home.

“Today, I think, I have stumbled into the category of the very poor as there is nothing to cook at home,” she said, her furrowed brows showing signs of anxiety. Every day she buys eight rotis “for 24 rupees (29 U.S. cents),” enough to tide them over until dinner.

Her husband had gone to Lahore, in the Punjab province, in search of their 17-year-old mentally challenged son, who had gone missing from a special home in this city. Having used up all their family savings, the mother of five can barely provide for the basic needs of her four daughters left in her care.

Many of the people in Taiser Town, a fairly new settlement of 95,000 people, were displaced in 2005 when their homes were demolished to make way for the Lyari Expressway in Pakistan’s commercial capital.

Still livid over their displacement, Ashiq Hussain, 55, said he and his neighbors were literally “thrown in the wilderness,” where hunger pangs soon gnawed at their poor, starved stomachs.

“I think she has come as a Godsend,” said Hussain of Saeed. “I and my family of 10 would not have been able to survive the spiraling food prices without this subsidised food.” Since she opened her first tandoor centre, Saeed has set up two others, the second one in Korangi and a third in Usman Goth, just a few kilometres from Taiser Town. Her maiden branch offers food to 150 displaced families.

She gets a lot of help from her team of workers. One of them is Habib Ahmed, who bakes the first batch of an average daily output of 1,600 rotis before sunrise. By midday people start arriving at the restaurant, either to eat there or take out food. The crowd thins out in an hour, allowing Ahmed some rest. By 7 p.m. the Khana Ghar comes alive again and remains open until 10 at night.

A team of two women and a male cook is in charge of the curry. Seema, mother of five, joined Saeed’s staff when her sick husband had to stop working. “With rising food prices, hunger and poverty has soared.” Because food at the Ghar costs so much less, she and her family are able to survive, she said.

Saeed began her philanthropic venture 10 years ago in her own neighbourhood in Surjani Town in Karachi “just to feed 15 to 25 families” for free. A newspaper report about a mother who, unable to feed her children, decided to kill them moved Saeed to action.

She soon realised that those handouts, though a welcome gesture to some, “were actually hurting their [the poor’s] dignity, so I put a price to the meals.” Donations from kind-hearted individuals have enabled her to maintain and expand her tandoors. “I need 350,000 rupees (4,268 U.S. dollars) a month, of which only one-fourth comes from what we earn.”

These donations and what little she earns from her food centres enable Saeed to serve two meals daily to about 1,600 people.

Ten years on, Saeed’s model seems to have caught on.

Sadia Agha, who runs a charitable school in a low-income locality of Karachi, has formed a group of ten women who helped her open a tandoor in Karachi’s Kala Pul area, where they feed about 600 people.

Similarly, Farisa Jafarey Hasan, a lawyer, does not have a meal centre of her own, but she, along with two friends, outsources bread and curry from a nearby tandoor to feed around 283 people in a neighbourhood in Korangi, another indigent community Karachi.

“Our aim is to provide relief to women-headed households—widows, abandoned women with children or those where the husband are either too sick to work or suffer from fatal injuries,” she said.

A three-day World Food Summit that opens Monday, Nov. 16, hopes to generate much needed action from the international community while calling attention to the plight of at least one billion people worldwide struggling with chronic hunger, based on estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), a specialised agency of the United Nations.

Nearly two-thirds of these people live in Asia and the Pacific region and the rest in Africa.

Escalating food prices have thrust the poor into deeper poverty and hunger. In Pakistan, South Asia’s second largest economy rose, consumer prices rose 11.2 percent in July, according to the Federal Bureau of Statistics.

Undernourishment in Pakistan now afflicts 28 percent of the population—up from 24 percent from last year. The number of people deemed to be “food insecure” increased from 60 million to 77 million during the same period.

Food insecurity essentially refers to a lack of access to food, which could be chronic or transitory and which, at its worst, could take the form of full-scale famine.

With Pakistan engaged in more intense fighting with militant groups in the South Waziristan region on the border of Afghanistan, and a fresh influx of the 155,000 internally displaced people from the conflict zone, food insecurity is bound to increase further.

Such a scenario exacerbates a burgeoning poverty, where more people are stripped of life’s most essential necessities, including food and shelter.

“About two to four percent of Pakistan’s population is mobile and homeless,” said Kaiser Bengali, a senior economist. “They stay wherever they find work. They have no address, no education, no birth certificates and therefore no identity cards, a pre-requisite for individuals who want to avail themselves of any formal government-initiated social protection programmes for the poor.

This floating population can never be integrated in any policy structure,” Bengali added.

When food prices doubled, said Bengali, it knocked down the “purchasing power” of the poor. He said the trend has been going on since 2005 “when inflation reached double digits.” The poor are always the hardest hit as they spend 52 to 72 percent of their income on food, he said.

Against this backdrop, “the soup kitchens [or tandoors] are the need of the hour,” said Bengali. “Every union council (smallest administrative unit at the village level) should be tasked with providing premises and then philanthropists invited to set up these subsidised food outlets.”

To some experts, however, tandoors—for all their noble intentions—may only be dishing up nibbles that may never fully address the growing hunger now gripping Pakistan over the long haul.

What is needed, they say, is a more lasting and sustainable solution to the gnawing hunger pangs afflicting many.

Based on the global scorecard released in October by the independent anti-poverty group ActionAid International, Pakistan ranked 26th out of 51 nations in terms of fighting hunger on the national front. The independent group’s report, ‘Who’s Really Fighting Hunger?’, looked into the prevalence of hunger and what governments were doing to fight it.

Javeria Malik, AA Pakistan’s spokesperson, said “more social protection programmes must be brought to the forefront of the battle against hunger.” Noted economist Haris Gazdar echoes this view. He calls for developing a “comprehensive” social protection system that is universal in coverage.