Fate of hungry citizens
Fate of hungry citizens
IN
60 years, there have been enough impositions of military rule and
enough experimentation with feudal versions of democracy to
demonstrate there isn’t much difference between them.
In a
truly democratic environment, it would have been unacceptable
audacity for an investment minister to make the cold-blooded
assurance that the Middle East countries investing in corporate
farming are ensured repatriation of 100 per cent of crops even if
Pakistan faces a shortage of food.
It parallels the
president’s unconcerned reaction to the food crisis. The problem
will be resolved by next year, he said — as if the poor have
stomachs different from ours that can suspend hunger pangs and death
from starvation for six to nine months until the government is able
to get its act together.
Such a blunt dismissal of the fate of
hungry citizens can only come from an outlook devoid of feeling for
fellow citizens. Definitely not the stuff of democracy. What
contingency plans does the minister have to avoid food riots again,
so they don’t degenerate to shoe-throws? Or will the buck be passed
from ministry to ministry until desperate people are again convinced
that hunger and joblessness won’t be solved?
What benefit
will Pakistan get out of such investment? Foreigners will use our
lands — which should have been better redistributed to peasants —
who can grow food, cash crops and an export surplus, provided they
are allowed to and are given the same support other citizens
are.
The investors will cultivate hundreds of thousands of
acres to grow food for themselves, not a morsel of which we’ll get,
but might feed their expatriates as well. They will use our water,
which is in short supply. They will use our energy, which is in even
greater short supply. They won’t pay taxes for 10 years. They’ll
use some of our cheap labour who’ll be so grateful to have jobs at
all and able to eat at all that they won’t join other peasants in
revolt. Instead we’ll be paying for millions of lost livelihood
opportunities and the environmental consequences of hundreds of
four-wheel drives and oil-guzzling harvesting combines that will add
to global warming.
Apart from polluted air and a lot less
love, Pakistan will get nothing in return; it’s an outright
giveaway — unless the only payment lies in the price tag for the
privilege of using our land. How much are the investors paying? Or is
that a secret too like World Bank/IMF/ADB deals and now the Bilateral
Investment Treaty with the US — although none have anything to do
with national security. Or is it because the one-off payment won’t
be rolled back into grass-roots development but be adjusted against
the oil the government keeps buying from the same investors to keep
themselves propped up?
Former prime minister Shaukat Aziz and
Gen Musharraf, who knew nothing about agriculture — picking up only
from Afaq Tiwana, landed bigwig, of the then Agricultural Advisory
Board — had no business to corporatise farming when the 1947
promise to restore land to the tiller was still pending after over
half a century. They did because our governments have always done as
they pleased and got away with it. At that time, decade-long tax
holidays and minimum landholdings offered to corporate investors were
1,000 acres, the upper ceiling being limited only by geography. The
minister merely reiterated a done deal.
A 30-year lease on
land will be extendable for 20 more years. By then, assuming
boundaries remained the same, after relentless drenching with
chemicals and pushing the land beyond its natural capacity, the
exhausted soil won’t be able to support any underground
microorganisms let alone any plant, human, bird or wildlife above the
ground. And after all is destroyed, there will be, as usual, no
public scrutiny. The culprits will be long gone as anywhere up to 10
governments would have come and gone by then.
With Benazir
Bhutto’s return there were tentative expectations that land reform,
even if in fits and starts, would finally come about. There was hope
that our new leaders would be inspired to behave more like Castro of
Cuba and Chavez of Venezuela and Morales of Bolivia in matters of
food security, mass rural employment and pride in one’s peasants.
But there’s less interest in the masses than in consolidating
control and money. We are voluntarily sold out to corporate
re-colonisation. Besides, previously, it was going to be a Bhutto
government, not a Zardari one.
There’s a wealth of proven
and freely available information from the UN and scores of other
agencies that even our government cannot dispute on the damage done
worldwide including in Pakistan to soils, waters and human health by
chemical monoculture, followed by GM crops, since the not-so-green
revolution of the mid-sixties. Nor does corporate, that is monopoly,
agriculture, create jobs; it decisively destroys them by the
millions. It has already destroyed a billion farm and farm-related
jobs worldwide, four million family farms in the US alone or 25
million or more victims.
By now the second or third generation
in government or parliament should have been better informed. That
couldn’t have been expected from the education system either here
or abroad, because real information is kept out by design by
corporate tentacles that have deeply infiltrated educational
institutions and the media worldwide. But surely, concerned officials
could learn from relevant journals and websites of respected,
independent institutions?
Can corporate-friendly governments
fulfil duties to citizens when our socio-economic woes have
degenerated to something as basic as hunger and lost livelihoods?
Once upon a time, that only happened to hapless African countries. We
have the solutions to mass rural unemployment and mass hunger at our
fingertips, but our rulers reject them because it will empower
ordinary people and spell less than gargantuan profits for the
entrenched minority. But the government even ignores UN advice to go
back to organic farming to rescue our failing capacity in crop
production as well as to mitigate global warming to which chemical
agriculture heavily contributes.
If corporate farming is such
a great thing, why isn’t the corporate deal document made public?
Why is it that all contentious matters are unilaterally dealt with by
the unelected and debated in parliament, if at all, and in the media
only after it’s too late and nothing can be undone?
Well,
there’s a saying to the effect that things have to be kept secret
when there is something dubious or damning to hide.
In : Najma Sadeque
Notes