Beyond VIP sops

THE president paid a visit to some of the rain and flood-affected areas of Sindh on Thursday; he also took a trip around Karachi’s water-ravaged localities. The Sindh governor and chief minister have made similar brief forays into the interior. During every such trip, the VIP is photographed passing on relief goods to some of the stricken people, and the event is duly recorded by the media for the benefit of posterity. It is almost made to appear as if the VIP is gifting items from his own pocket when these are actually paid for by the state or donated by relief agencies. Perhaps the visits have some utility in that they give people a feeling that somebody up there in the capitals cares; perhaps also, they temporarily put a little life into officials on the spot and make them shake a leg or two. But they still represent little beyond tokenism, especially when seen in the context of the grim reports coming in from Badin and the other districts that bore the brunt of rain-related devastation.

Almost 400 Sindh villages are said to have been washed away; the bulk of the standing crops has been destroyed; there have been huge losses of cattle; and the overall toll of people killed is now reckoned at nearly 170, but many missing persons are still unaccounted for. This is only a cold statistical picture of the havoc wrought by the heaviest rains in about a decade: the actual human suffering is far worse, and continues. There are thousands still homeless, with estimates of displaced persons ranging from 100,000 to 350,000. These are people who have lost not only their dwellings but their means of subsistence. As always in natural catastrophes, it is the poorest sections of the population that have suffered. A calamity of this magnitude needs more than VIP sops. The chief minister and his ministers should have set up camp in the most badly hit areas. They did not. It is also not certain how many MNAs and MPAs of the areas concerned bothered to visit their constituencies, particularly towns and villages lying further in the interior beyond Badin. The Sindh governor even found time in between to fly off to London for a couple of days. The president came days after the rains.

A much more sustained and energetic effort is required to provide succour to the people, and a survey should be immediately undertaken to pinpoint the extent of the damage. The district relief committees set up by the provincial administration are already said to be hampered by political differences among the members, and it does not require much prescience to predict that not much work will get done in this way. It is the duty of the people’s elected representatives to ensure that food, money and material get to where they are required most. Many of the legislators are people of means: they could, learning from experience, at least build community shelters to house their people in future emergencies. There have been consistent allegations in the press that bad planning of drainage projects aggravated the crisis. It is said there was at least as much flooding caused by the drains as by the rains. These allegations should be thoroughly looked into and the faults rectified if our engineers and irrigation experts wish to avoid being held responsible for creating man-made disasters.

Saindak gets going

THE commencement of production at the Saindak copper-gold project in Balochistan earlier this week is a very significant achievement for a number of reasons. Federal Petroleum and Natural Resources Minister Naurez Shakoor has said that the project will earn over $45 million annually through the export of copper and its byproducts. This makes the project an important foreign exchange earner for the country. The commencement of production here also signifies the gradual emergence of Pakistan as one of the world’s major copper producers. This is likely to happen within the next five years. The project would attract international interest in Balochistan, where there is great potential in mineral exploration and extraction.

Ever since the project’s parent company, Saindak Metals Limited, was set up in 1974, the Saindak gold-copper project has been afflicted by a number of problems, because of which the project remained in limbo for nearly three decades. The fortunes of the project were revived after technical assistance was provided by China, which first helped the project start trial production in 1995 after the Metallurgical Company of China (MCC) took over the project in 1992. This, however, was discontinued the next year owing to the paucity of funds. In 2002, the MCC was again invited to resume work on the project, this time with financial assistance from the Chinese government. The result of this effort has been the resumption of production earlier this week.

The project is not just a symbol of Pakistan-China friendship. It also shows how such projects that hold immense potential and are in the national interest can go ahead if there is a will on the part of the government. In this case, the economic and social benefits of the Saindak project for a backward province like Balochistan, and for the country as a whole far outweigh its initial costs.

Pesticides in beverages

A study carried out by a New Delhi-based environmental NGO has many Indians, including parliament, up in arms against two better known US beverages. The survey by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) — the same organization that fought and won a court case banning diesel fuel in Delhi’s buses — found that drinks marketed by these multinationals in India contained a “deadly cocktail of pesticide residues” not found in similar beverages sold in the US. It blamed the firms for not taking due care to purify the water that they use to make their products. This matter of pesticides making their way into branded beverages also requires scrutiny in Pakistan, especially by organizations involved in consumer and environmental protection. Blaming foreign firms for this is to duck the real issue which is how water resources became so polluted in the first place. Agriculture is the economy’s mainstay, and numerous brands of pesticides are aggressively marketed to farmers. The problem is that most are unaware of how much pesticide to use on crops or how to store it. The media has often reported on massive amounts of pesticides being stored around the countryside in unsafe locations, close to population centres and freshwater sources.

Considering this, it is only natural to ask whether the purity of beverages and bottled water can be taken for granted in this country. The government has failed to ensure that beverages adhere to the purity levels claimed by manufacturers. Criticism is also due towards Pakistan’s environment NGOs because — unlike the CSE in New Delhi — most are actively engaged in consulting for the government and the corporate sector, thus compromising their status as impartial monitors. Unless NGOs are more willing to probe this issue and unless the government is committed to ensuring clean water supplies, blaming multinationals on mere suspicion in a futile show of patriotism will be the only option left.