After a good day at the market in the capital, Dushanbe, 73-year-old Safar said that the few dozen kilograms of apples and plums which he and his wife has sold was enough to buy some food staples.
"With the money we earned, we will buy green tea, flour, a bit of sugar, rice and a handful of cheap candy for the grandkids," he said.
Summer is a lifesaver for thousands of Tajik families, whose only hope of respite from hunger rations are the earnings made from selling fruit and vegetables.
"We will not buy meat, it is too expensive, and the money we made would be barely enough for three kilograms (seven pounds) of beef," Safar said.
"I do not buy meat or milk, we make do with home-made bread," said 36-year-old Nazokat, a Dushanbe mother of six, whose husband left five years ago to try and make what money he could in Russia of Kazakhstan. She has not heard from him since.
Nazokat was left to earn her way by selling cellophane packets on the market, with three of her oldest children helping her.
"The capital's shops are bursting at the seams with imported food, but only a small number of well-to-do can afford their prices," said Saodat Sokhibnazarova, development research chief at the presidential strategic research center.
Tajikistan's agriculture ministry says production of meat, milk, fruit, vegetables and grains is on the rise, as is cotton, the country's chief export, but output still falls behind demand. "The agrarian sector is livening up, the meat and milk production is growing, and so is livestock," the livestock department chief Faizullo Tilloyev told AFP by telephone.
Last year's grain harvest, for example, exceeded 800,000 tonnes -- above previous years but below the estimated demand of one million tonnes.
"Bread and potatoes are the chief food for most Tajiks, they are affordable -- so their demand is met, while the need for meat is met only 10 percent," Sokhibnazarova said.
The nutritional deficiencies inevitably reflect on the health of the population.
"Insufficient diet destroys a body's immunity system, defective children are born, it can lead to the nation's destruction," she warned.
In July last year, the United Nations launched a two-year aid program, which would supply 1.3 million of Tajikistan's poor with wheat flour, vegetable oil, beans and sugar.
But observers say it will only make a small dent in the needs of the poorest of all former Soviet republics, where most of the infrastructure has yet to be rebuilt following the 1992-1997 civil war which caused an estimated seven billion dollars in damage.
According to a report by the United Nations Development Program, Tajikistan ranks 116 on a list of 177 countries in human development, a fall of three places from its 2003 placing.