By Muhammad Zulqarnain

Food, housing and utilities consume nearly two-thirds of Pakistani household budgets, trapping low-income families in nutritional poverty when their purchasing power comes under pressure.

Pakistan’s Household Integrated Economic Survey (HIES) 2024-25 shows that food accounts for roughly 37% of household expenditure, while housing, water, electricity, gas and fuel account for another 26%.

Experts say this heavy concentration of spending on essential needs means financially constrained households tend to protect basic calorie intake while reducing consumption of relatively expensive protein- and micronutrient-rich foods.

The issue has gained greater relevance following the latest World Bank-FAO estimates, which put the global cost of a healthy diet at PPP $4.28 per person per day in 2025 and show that around 2.7 billion people worldwide cannot afford one.

Speaking to Wealth Pakistan, Inayat Ullah, Chief of Research at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), said Pakistan no longer faced merely a calorie problem but an increasingly serious diet-quality challenge.

“Households are very likely meeting energy requirements while steadily retreating from protein- and micronutrient-dense foods,” he said.

He pointed to the declining share of mutton in food expenditure, which fell nationally from around 2.2% in 2018-19 to approximately 1.8% in 2024-25. Among the poorest income quintile, its share stood at only around 0.3%.

Inayat said households facing declining real purchasing power did not initially cut calories. Instead, they reduced dietary diversity because staple foods remained the cheapest way to meet basic energy requirements.

He noted that largely unavoidable housing and utility expenses further limited households’ ability to adjust their budgets. Consequently, food quality became the “shock absorber” when families experienced income losses, illness, agricultural setbacks or increases in essential expenses.

The effects were most severe for children, pregnant and lactating women and persons with disabilities, whose health and development were particularly vulnerable to reduced dietary diversity, he added.

Inayat called for nutrition-linked social transfers, regular monitoring of healthy-diet costs, investment in cold chains and reforms aimed at reducing the cost of livestock, poultry, pulses, dairy, fruit and vegetables.

He also recommended aligning agricultural incentives more closely with nutritional requirements by encouraging pulses, horticulture and dairy rather than concentrating on crops that delivered caloric bulk.

Dr Muhammad Shahbaz, President of the China Pakistan Medical Association, told Wealth Pakistan that rising food prices and weakened purchasing power were pushing low-income households towards cheaper, calorie-dense foods at the expense of proteins, vegetables, fruits and essential micronutrients.

He called for coordinated measures, including targeted cash and nutrition support, affordable healthy foods, stricter price monitoring, lower supply-chain losses, nutrition-sensitive agriculture, and public awareness campaigns.

Both experts stressed the importance of regularly tracking healthy-diet affordability to provide policymakers with a clearer picture of households’ ability to access nutritious food.

They said existing HIES and food-price data could be used to track the minimum cost of a nutritious basket across provinces and income groups without requiring a major expansion in public expenditure.

Dr Shahbaz said such evidence would allow the government to better target assistance towards households and food categories facing the widest affordability gaps.

Experts said measuring what families could actually afford to put on their plates, rather than focusing mainly on the availability of sufficient calories, could help Pakistan broaden its food-security policy towards improving dietary quality and tackling malnutrition and diet-related disease.

Credit: INP-WealthPk