Hunger Pains:

Pakistan’s Food Insecurity

June 3, 2009

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

ZAFAR ALTAF is chairman of the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC), a position he also held during two different periods in the 1990s. He has held several additional posts with Pakistan’s government, including agriculture secretary and Planning Commission member. He has also served with the Punjab provincial government as chief economist and agriculture secretary. He has held leadership positions with a variety of agricultural organizations, including the Soil Sciences Society and the Asia Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions, both of which he has chaired. Dr. Altaf has also taught economics at three Pakistani universities.

ROBERT M. HATHAWAY is Asia Program director at the Wilson Center. Previously, he served for 12 years on the professional staff of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, where he specialized in American foreign policy toward Asia. He has also been a member of the history staff of the Central Intelligence Agency. Dr. Hathaway’s recent publications include the co-edited Powering Pakistan: Meeting Pakistan’s Energy Needs in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2009) and the co-edited Hard Sell: Attaining Pakistani Competitiveness in Global Trade (Wilson Center, 2008).

GAUTAM HAZARIKA is an associate professor with the School of Business at the University of Texas at Brownsville. He is also a research fellow with the Germany-based Institute for the Study of Labor. Previously, he taught economics at Virginia Tech University. His expertise ranges from trade liberalization and child labor in less-developed countries to food security and education in South Asia. His publications include a book chapter on women’s status and children’s food security in Pakistan. Dr. Hazarika is now working on a project that provides a gendered perspective on children’s nutrition, susceptibility to illness, and access to health care in Pakistan.

ALLAN JURY is director of the U.S. relations office of the World Food Program (WFP). He manages the organization’s relations with its major partners in the United States, including the World Bank headquarters. He previously served as WFP’s director of external relations, with responsibility for the development of organizational policy on UN reform, interagency affairs, and relations with nongovernmental organizations. He has also served as chief of the WFP’s policy service. Before WFP, Mr. Jury spent 25 years with the U.S. Department of State, where his posts included director for policy and resource planning with State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration.

RIAZ MOHAMMAD KHAN is the Wilson Center’s Pakistan Scholar. Previously, he spent nearly four decades in Pakistan’s diplomatic service, where his last positions were foreign secretary (2005-08) and ambassador to China (2002-05). He also held posts dealing with Europe, Central Asia, Afghanistan, arms control, and disarmament. He is the author of Untying the Afghan Knot: Negotiating Soviet Withdrawal, written while he was a diplomat-in-residence at Georgetown University. At the Wilson Center, Ambassador Khan is working on a book detailing the Afghanistan conflict’s impact on Pakistan, as well as the conflict’s regional and international implications.

MICHAEL KUGELMAN is program associate with the Asia Program at the Wilson Center, where he is responsible for research, programming, and publications on South Asia. Many of his recent Wilson Center projects have focused on water, food, and energy challenges in South Asia. Mr. Kugelman’s publications include the co-edited Powering Pakistan: Meeting Pakistan’s Energy Needs in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2009); the co-edited Hard Sell: Attaining Pakistani Competitiveness in Global Trade; and the edited Foreign Addiction: Assessing India’s Energy Security Strategy (both Wilson Center, 2008).

KENNETH IAIN MACDONALD is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto. His research interests are nature, society, and environmental change. Much of his academic and field work has focused on Pakistan’s Northern Areas, including subsistence agricultural communities, and how development interventions impact food security. Recently, he has also studied how political, economic, and social factors have affected household food security in Kashmir following the 2005 earthquake. Dr. MacDonald has published a number of articles on ecology and conservation, some of which address how these themes play out in the Northern Areas.

ROSHAN MALIK is a Ph.D. student with the Department of Sociology at Iowa State University. He is also a visiting fellow at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, where he has focused on agricultural trade, rights to food, and governance. Previously, he was associated with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. He has also worked in Pakistan with the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) and Action Aid, focusing on food security and rural livelihoods. While at SDPI, Mr. Malik was involved in an analysis of Pakistan’s food security conducted by SDPI and the World Food Program.

SOHAIL JEHANGIR MALIK is chairman of Innovative Development Strategies (Pvt.) Ltd, an Islamabad-based consulting firm. He has more than 30 years of experience in agriculture and development policy and analysis, and much of his career has involved the setting up and evaluation of agricultural development strategies in Pakistan and other countries in Asia and Africa. His previous positions include research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute and senior economist at the World Bank. Dr. Malik has also held the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan Chair in Economics at the University of Agriculture at Faisalabad and at the University of Sargodha.

WILLIAM B. MILAM is a Senior Policy Scholar at the Wilson Center. A career diplomat, Ambassador Milam retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in mid-2001, but was recalled after September 11th to help establish the multilateral mechanism for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. He served as U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from August 1998 to July 2001. Additionally, Ambassador Milam has served as U.S. chief of mission in Liberia, U.S. special negotiator for environmental and scientific affairs, U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, and temporary U.S. chief of mission in Libya. His new book, Bangladesh and Pakistan: Flirting with Failure in South Asia, was published this year.

ABID QAIYUM SULERI is executive director of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Islamabad. His major research interests include globalization and rural livelihoods, food security, and sustainable natural resources governance. He has served as team leader on a joint project with the World Food Program analyzing food security at the district level throughout Pakistan. He is also leading an ongoing research initiative, in collaboration with Pakistan’s Planning Commission, which studies rainwater harvesting and safe drinking water access in Pakistan’s Thar and Cholistan deserts. Prior to arriving at SDPI, Dr. Suleri handled Oxfam-Great Britain’s Pakistan programming.

SAADIA TOOR is assistant professor of sociology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. Her prime interest—both political and scholarly—lies in the relationship between political economy and culture, and in the broader themes of gender, community, violence, culture, nationalism, sexuality, state formation, and international political economy. Her recent publications include articles on child labor in Pakistan’s export industries, and on gender and the politics of Islamization in Pakistan. Dr. Toor is currently at work on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Nationalizing Islam: The Political Economy of National Culture in Pakistan.