by Mysbah Balagamwala and Haris Gazdar
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| The mother of one of our respondents in Karachi cooks roti (flat bread). Roti made from wheat flour is the staple food in our research sites Photo Credit: Naila Mahmood/Collective for Social Science Research |
Countries like Pakistan always appear at the global stage to
be battling big challenges such as political crises, conflicts and disasters. But the picture remains incomplete without
seeing challenges of a different kind that ordinary people, particularly the
poorest, face on a daily basis. Research
conducted in Pakistan, alongside nine other developing countries, for the Life
in a Time of Food Price Volatility project provides just such a perspective. Qualitative research was carried out by the Collective for Social Science Research
in 2012 and 2013 in
a cluster of villages in Dadu district and in an urban working-class
neighbourhood in Karachi to explore how rising food prices were affecting the
poor. Three important themes emerged from our research in Pakistan which helps understand ways in which food inflation
impacts the poor and the vulnerable.
The economy of the poorest is about food,
not money
Survival strategies of the poorest are centred on acquiring
staple food to avoid hunger. In the Dadu villages, where wheat is the only
major crop these strategies revolved around the crop cycle. During harvest,
activities of all the households are around acquisition of wheat either
directly through agricultural labour or indirectly by providing other services
in exchange for grain. The wheat is stored and consumed over several months and
is also used as a currency to purchase other goods and services. For the urban
poor, who engage in a range of activities including petty vending, wage labour
and begging, the main priority is to acquire sufficient amounts of wheat flour
or bread to fill their bellies. Many of
the poorest work, borrow, or beg to ensure that they have just enough to eat,
regardless of prices and wages, and they generally only scrape by. For the
rural poor, wheat prices matters little because their annual cycle is focused
on acquiring a target quantity of grain.
Money, therefore, is almost incidental in these survival strategies
which combine remunerative economic activity with borrowing and begging to
stave off hunger.
Informal systems and blurred boundaries
Support from informal institutions reduce a poor household’s
dependence on market denominated transactions and instead increase their
reliance on other households and individuals. Of course these social arrangements,
which might protect individuals from prolonged periods of hunger, come at a
social cost in the form of humiliation and loss of respect. Food is circulated
in a community though reciprocal exchanges between neighbours and family,
regular charity by somewhat better-off households and individuals (who may
themselves be poor in the wider scheme of things) and through begging by those
entirely dependent on alms for survival. These various forms of non-monetised
food transfers often occur in overlapping layers. Reciprocal gift exchange might be extended to
one-sided support for some time, and people who might accept charitable
donations on religious occasions might sometimes beg outright.
For people on the margins, the household or the basic social
arrangement for cohabitation and joint consumption also has fluid
boundaries. While ‘normal’ households
are often identified as the unit that shares regular meals among its members,
we found diverse arrangements in place which ensure the sustenance of
individuals. For example, children are easily
able to go their neighbours or relatives to eat when there is not enough food
in their own home. An adult woman doing domestic
work might count on eating lunch at her employers’ house, and then coming home
to prepare a meal for other family members.
Households break down under conditions of stress, and often the first
sign of male household members leaving is them not eating meals with the rest
of the family.
Idiosyncratic changes
overshadow price shocks
The longitudinal design of the study enabled us to survey
the same households in two different years providing rich data on the changes
experienced by the household over the year. We were able to identify
conspicuous changes that a household undergoes such as variations in its earning
potential and livelihood, alternation in its size and composition, and
conflicts within, which are sources of positive as well as negative shocks. For
instance, the social and economic condition of one respondent improved after
her husband got a job in the police while another respondent’s husband had to
give up his rickshaw, the main source
of their earnings due to his inability to meet rental payments. One of our
case-study households, flood-affected migrants in Karachi, were evicted from their
uncle’s house after a family dispute while another respondent, also a
flood-affected migrant, who was initially living in a warehouse was joined by
his family and had moved into a house. The severity of these events at the
individual and household level appears to have more of an impact on people’s
lives making the effect of inflation secondary.
Next steps
In-depth qualitative research provides insights into how the
effects of macro-level changes such as inflation and government policies are experienced
by poor individuals and households. In the third round of fieldwork,
starting soon, we will re-visit our informants to see how their well-being has
changed over the last year. We aim to go beyond the quantity of food consumed by
asking informants about their perceptions of the quality of the food they
consume and how consumption habits and food preferences change over time.
This post originally appeared
on the IDS Governance and Development blog
