Pakistan’s cheapest source of calories has grown dearer far faster than its cheapest sources of protein — a split that complicates the argument that nutrient-rich food is being priced out of Pakistani diets.
Dawn published a video explainer on Monday under the line that “nutrient-rich foods are the first to be cut from diets due to a decrease in purchasing power” (Dawn). The page is a video with essentially no article text — a single quoted sentence from a DawnNews producer — and carries no survey, no consumption dataset, no tax rate and no named economist. It sits beside Dawn material tied to ACT For Nutrition, a campaign and conference Dawn says runs on 2–3 September at Islamabad’s Serena Hotel.
What the price data shows
The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics Sensitive Price Index — a weekly gauge of 51 essential items across 17 cities, not headline inflation — rose 9.04 per cent year on year in the week ended 27 August, easing from 9.66 per cent a week earlier. The lowest-income quintile’s index was up 8.76 per cent.
Inside that basket the movement is not uniform. Wheat flour is up 45.28 per cent on the year. Onions are up 125.86 per cent, tomatoes 36.69 per cent.
But chicken is down 23.87 per cent, eggs down 17.97 per cent, potatoes down 31.33 per cent, sugar down 19.33 per cent, and pulses — gram, masoor, moong — down between 5 and 12 per cent.
A separate index points the same way. In the PBS monthly review for July — urban CPI, not the SPI, and a July-on-July comparison rather than a weekly one, so the magnitudes are not interchangeable — wheat flour is +67.56 per cent year on year, chicken -13.49 per cent and eggs -10.31 per cent (PBS). Headline CPI inflation that month was 9.2 per cent, down from 11.1 per cent in June, with urban food up 9.6 per cent against 8.2 per cent for non-food.
The relative price moved the other way
Recomputing from PBS retail prices for the weeks ended 28 August 2025 and 27 August 2026: a kilo of live broiler chicken cost the equivalent of 5.15kg of wheat flour a year ago. It now costs 2.70kg — a 48 per cent fall in its price relative to the staple. A dozen eggs has fallen from 3.34kg of flour to 1.88kg.
Measured against bread, in other words, protein got cheaper. If households are still cutting it, the binding constraint is the size of the food budget, not the relative price of nutrition.
That budget is being absorbed elsewhere. Wheat flour carries a 6.14 per cent weight in the poorest quintile’s SPI basket against 3.97 per cent for all households — 1.5 times the exposure to the fastest-rising staple.
Milk is the exception that fits the campaign’s case. Fresh milk is the single heaviest item in the poorest quintile’s basket at 17.54 per cent, and it is up 8.21 per cent on the year.
Notified prices are not retail prices
In Lahore, tomatoes notified at Rs160–175 a kilo were retailing at Rs250–300, and onions notified at Rs185–195 sold for Rs220–250 (The Express Tribune).
The evidence gap
The nutrition figures underpinning all of this are old. Stunting at 40 per cent of under-fives — corroborated by the World Food Programme, which also puts undernourishment at 20.7 per cent of the population — and wasting at 17.7 per cent both come from the National Nutrition Survey 2018.
No published Pakistani dataset yet measures what households actually stopped eating in 2026. Until PBS releases fresh household expenditure figures, the claim that nutrient-rich food is being cut first remains an inference from prices and incomes, not a measurement.
