For families in Quetta, putting chicken on the dinner table has suddenly become a much dearer affair. Retailers in the provincial capital are now asking between Rs. 630 and Rs. 700 for a single kilogram, a sharp climb that has caught household budgets off guard and left many shoppers rethinking what they cook at home.
The rise has been swift. At the start of the week, a kilogram was going for around Rs. 430, but the price has moved upward day after day since then, and there has been little sign of it settling back down. For a food item that many households treat as an everyday staple, and often as the most affordable meat on the menu, a jump of this size in a matter of days is hard to absorb.
The timing makes it harder still. Families across Balochistan are already stretching their incomes to cover basic necessities, and flour is among the items that have been weighing on household budgets. When another staple follows the same path, the weekly grocery bill grows in a way that leaves little room for anything else, and it is the lower-income households that feel the squeeze first.
Shoppers have another grievance as well. Some say that certain shopkeepers advertise a slightly lower price but then hand over less than the weight they have charged for, so the customer ends up paying the higher rate anyway, just less openly. That complaint, on top of the price itself, has added to the frustration felt at the counter.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Tomás Castelazo
Shopkeepers, for their part, point to a supply chain under strain. They say consignments from Sindh and Punjab, which Quetta’s market has long relied upon, have been suspended, cutting off a major source of birds for the city. At the same time, repeated increases in diesel prices have pushed up what it costs to move goods by truck, and those freight charges are now feeding directly into the price of chicken.
Local poultry farmers are caught in the same bind. Feed has become expensive, and the other costs of raising birds have risen alongside it, so farms in the province cannot simply sell at the old rates and stay in business. Traders echo the point, saying that dearer feed and higher farming expenses have raised the cost of producing chicken, and that cost is now working its way through to the shops.
Unless supplies from other provinces resume and feed costs come down, there is little in the present picture to suggest a quick fall in prices. The episode is a reminder of how exposed Quetta’s food market is to disruptions hundreds of kilometres away, and it leaves two questions hanging for the days ahead: whether the authorities will step in to check both prices and weighing practices, and how long ordinary households will have to make do with less of a food they once counted as affordable.
