Pakistan tops region in people who can't afford a healthy diet: World Bank

 

Pakistan finds itself at both the center and the periphery of a mounting food security crisis gripping the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan region, according to a new World Bank report, "Building Food Security, Creating Jobs." With a population of 151 million people unable to afford a healthy diet, Pakistan has, by the report's account, the largest group of people in the region who cannot afford a nutritious diet, ahead even of Egypt's 66 million.

The report paints a picture of a country that is agriculturally self-sufficient on paper but food-insecure in practice. Pakistan is nearly food self-sufficient, unlike most of its neighbors, which import roughly half their calories. Cereal yields there have jumped 96 percent since the 1990s, nearly double the rate of the rest of the region. Yet that production success has not translated into affordable diets. The report notes that in Pakistan, "inflation increased by 40 percent year on year in 2023," forcing households to lean heavily on wheat, which now makes up more than 40 percent of total caloric intake, while nutrient-dense foods go underconsumed.

The affordability numbers are stark. Some 60.3 percent of Pakistan's population could not afford a healthy diet in 2024, the highest share of any country measured in the report, ahead of Syria (57.1 percent), Egypt (56.8 percent), and Djibouti (53.6 percent). The threshold for a healthy diet in Pakistan is calculated at $4.78 per person per day in 2017 purchasing power parity terms, lower than Egypt's $6.42 threshold, reflecting Pakistan's lower overall cost of living, but still out of reach for most households.

What worries the report's authors most is how precarious the situation is even for those who currently clear that bar. One in three Pakistani households sit within just one dollar of the affordability line, meaning a modest price shock could tip an additional 13 percent of the population into food insecurity. The flip side, the report notes, is that a similar share could climb out of insecurity with only modest income gains, meaning the crisis is not necessarily locked in.

Rural Pakistan bears the brunt of this hardship. Poverty rates stand at 55.1 percent in rural areas versus 26.6 percent in cities, with four in five poor Pakistanis living in rural communities, a gap far wider than in Egypt or Tunisia. Compounding this is a widening water crisis: the report warns that Pakistan faces "the rising frequency and severity of flooding," even as agriculture consumes the vast majority of the country's water resources. Roughly 80 percent of Pakistan's agricultural value added depends on irrigated land, leaving the sector deeply exposed to both floods and future scarcity. By 2050, the country is projected to face a warming of 2.5 to 4.0 degrees Celsius alongside a growing South Asian monsoon that could intensify both droughts and floods.

Nutrition outcomes reveal a double burden. Pakistan sits among countries battling both high rates of adult overweight, driven partly by cheap, calorie-dense wheat-based diets, and elevated child stunting, a combination the report calls one of the starkest in the region. Meanwhile, jobs data show that Pakistan's agrifood system behaves differently from its neighbors: on-farm employment outside Pakistan runs well below global norms, and farm labor productivity in the country has kept growing even as the number of farm workers has increased, an unusual pattern the report attributes to the sheer scale of Pakistan's agricultural economy.

On investment, the report flags Pakistan as an outlier in public spending. The country allocates roughly 3.0 percent of agriculture's value added toward research and development, the report states, a level it frames as inadequate relative to the sector's needs, even though this exceeds spending shares seen in some neighboring economies.

The World Bank's response centers on its AgriConnect initiative, launched in 2025 with a goal of mobilizing $9 billion a year in Bank agribusiness commitments and an additional $5 billion annually from partners, aiming to reach 300 million smallholder farmers globally by 2030. Pakistan's Punjab province is highlighted as an early test case, where the initiative is aligning World Bank support with International Finance Corporation financing to modernize warehousing and expand access to markets and credit for smallholder farmers.

Taken together, the report's message for Pakistan is double-edged. The country has proven it can grow enough food to feed itself, a rare achievement in a region reliant on imports, but it has not proven it can make that food affordable for tens of millions of its own people, especially in the flood-prone, water-stressed countryside where poverty remains deeply entrenched.