Of late, huge crowds queuing up outside the outlets of wheat flour dealers, seeking the commodity at the government’s subsidized rate, have become a common sight across the length and breadth of the country as the price of the staple has taken a sharp flight over the past week, sparking protests against the arrangement in several areas. As the price of flour, like the prices of other essential food and non-food commodities of daily use, has increased by leaps and bounds over the past week, the upward trend speaks of a long drawn-out economic crisis that has been galvanizing in the country for decades and which has come to the fore at a time when the entire world is gripped by mounting concerns about economic meltdown and food security in the face of a raging war between Russia and Ukraine and military and geopolitical tensions elsewhere.
With the recent and unprecedented rise in the price of wheat flour, as media reports suggest, the commodity has also disappeared from the markets in parts of the country, deepening economic woes of the people, who are compelled to run from the pillar to the post to buy subsidized flour or find the commodity ready to pay for it on the seller’s demand only to feed their families. Notwithstanding the sharp surge in the price of wheat flour, the rise in the prices of other commodities like chicken, rice and pulses has pushed weekly inflation up by 1.09 per cent in the past week.
According to data of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, the annual inflation has increased by 30.60 per cent, which has multiplied the economic worries of the low and middle-income groups, who increasingly lose their spending capacity for even essential items. Analysts say that the estimated consumer price index (CPI) for January 2023 is 27 per cent compared with the CPI of December 2022, which remained 24 per cent, which points to further increase in the price of chicken and wheat flour besides other essential commodities.
The unbridled flight of wheat flour has sparked protest demonstrations from Khyber to Karachi, with the people saying that a steep rise in the price of wheat flour shows that both the federal and all the provincial governments have failed to provide relief to common man, but instead they have been intentionally driving the poor masses to the brink of starvation. The PBS data attribute different weightages to the commodities in the sensitive price index (SPI) basket. For the group with the lowest spending capacity, wheat flour holds a weightage of 6.1372 per cent, whereas for the combined group the weightage stands at 3.9725 per cent. The SPI was recorded at 219.56 points against 217.20 points registered last week and 168.12 points recorded during the corresponding week which ended January 1, 2022.
The situation urgently calls for remedial measures as desperate crowds gathering outside the outlets of subsidized wheat flour have been losing their patience, which led to a stampede in the Sindh province, where hundreds of people stormed trucks carrying wheat flour to a designated point in Mirpurkhas district.
The unruly situation has triggered a strong reaction from all the political parties, who are in power in some way or the other either in the center or in the provinces, calling it “cosmetic arrangements” in the name of relief to the common people reeling under a multitude of problems. Whether or not the arrangements are “cosmetic”, the crisis of staple food needs a serious and pragmatic solution to save the countrymen from further economic burden.
