| 08 July 2004 | Thursday | 19 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425 |
Rise in food imports
Cost of poor sanitation
A Quartet - the UN, US, EU and Russia - team has urged the Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei not to use an impending International Court of Justice verdict against Israel's West Bank wall to gain support for the Palestinian cause.
Two months earlier, the Quartet had met in New York, promising to revive the stalled peace process and seeking to bridge the gap between the US and the rest of the Quartet after President Bush unilaterally endorsed Mr Ariel Sharon's controversial Gaza pull-out plan.
The UN, EU and Russia believed that the plan was in violation of the roadmap peace initiative taken by the Quartet and unveiled in April last year by President Bush himself.
As expected, Mr Sharon's plan was vetoed by his ruling rightwing Likud Party, seemingly forcing him to retain 17 of the 21 Jewish settlements he had promised to dismantle in Gaza in exchange for keeping many others in the West Bank.
The ensuing debate over the controversial plan effectively halted implementation of the roadmap, which envisaged the dismantling of all Jewish settlements in occupied territories and the creation of an independent Palestinian state by 2005.
This was not the first time Israel derailed a settlement plan acceptable to all stakeholders; the long-drawn Oslo process earlier had met a similar fate. The May 3 Quartet meeting in New York had called on Israel to abstain from unilateral action in exchange for accepting the bifurcation wall being built by Mr Sharon as a temporary security measure.
It had also promised to "act urgently to ensure (that) Palestinian humanitarian needs are met, infrastructure restored and developed and economic activity reinvigorated."
However, no such action has been taken by the Quartet. Israel has continued its reign of terror in Gaza, killing and maiming innocent civilians and refusing to implement the roadmap plan.
The Quartet's soft line on Israel has led to widespread resentment against the West not only among Palestinians but among all Arabs and Muslims everywhere. The anger thus generated has fed the arsenal of those extremists who indoctrinate young people to fight a holy war, using them as fodder to carry out terrorist attacks against western and perceived pro-West targets.
The wave of terrorism sweeping across the Muslim world - Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Turkey, Morocco, Pakistan Indonesia... the list is endless - is based on this resentment. The West itself is not safe from such attacks, as the Madrid train bombings in March have shown.
The obvious conclusion is that a just settlement of the Middle East conflict could contain a lot of terrorism plaguing the world today. Israel by its actions and the US by its unconditional backing of the Zionist regime have shown that mere lip service to the Palestinian cause would not do.
The on-going situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, the hounding of Arabs and Muslims in the US and the uncertain fate of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other prisons under western control elsewhere have not helped matters either.
In fact, the Iraq war is being seen by many as having as one of its objectives the strengthening of Israel. The other three members of the Quartet must act now to steer the US into pressuring Israel not to sabotage the roadmap to peace.
The only way to do this is to ensure that Israel starts implementing the plan step by step so that a sovereign Palestinian state can become a reality within the stipulated timeframe.
Rise in food imports
Predictions of a rise in the food import bill to $1.5 billion in the current fiscal year as against $600 million in 2003-04 should be a cause for concern. The items that are expected to register a quantitative rise include wheat, tea, spices, dry fruit and other edibles.
In addition, there will be a qualitative rise in the import of edible oil and pulses as international prices of these items are currently very high. A rise in food imports means more pressure on the current account.
The recent losses suffered by the rupee against the US dollar in the foreign exchange market are indicative of this pressure. Food items are not the only category expected to register a rise.
With the termination of the Saudi oil facility and the increase in international oil prices, the country's oil import bill will also jump, although it is not clear to what extent.
While some economists argue that this may be a good thing since such imports denote a rise in economic activity, a closer look at the composition of imports will lead to questioning the rationale of this argument.
Total imports stood at $15 billion in 2003-04, with machinery imports increasing by 33 per cent in the year. However, the bulk of this machinery was imported by the public sector in the form of railway equipment, vehicles and aircraft.
The rise in import of textile machinery and construction equipment has been quite insignificant. Apart from abstruse economic calculations, however, it is the cost to be paid by the common citizen that should be reckoned with. For one, efforts should be made to boost local production.
The import of wheat alone is expected to cost the country up to $450 million in the current year. As Pakistan has been self-sufficient in this commodity in the past, efforts should be made to ensure better local production this year.
The only silver lining in all this is that the rise recorded for some categories of food items is because of the government's reduction in import duties which in turn allows previously smuggled items come through legal channels.
Cost of poor sanitation
The revelation at a seminar in Islamabad that Pakistan spends less than 0.25 per cent of its GDP on sanitation speaks of the low priority the government attaches to a very important public health issue.
According to the UNDP, 45 per cent of households do not have access to a toilet while 49 per cent do not have a sewage or waste drainage system. The situation in the rural areas is much worse, with a survey done a couple of years ago revealing that over two-thirds of rural households in Punjab do not have a toilet.
People use open fields as a community latrine, with the result that human waste ends up contaminating water sources and spreading water-borne diseases like diarrhoea and dysentery.
The bleak situation is further compounded by the fact that children suffer more from such diseases because parents and elders do not teach them the importance of personal hygiene.
In Pakistan, diarrhoea takes the lives of around 250,000 children every year. The number of such deaths could be brought down drastically if there were universal access to sanitation facilities. Several things need to be done for that to happen.
Funding will have to be increased, especially at the municipal and tehsil levels. In addition, local administrations which undertake such projects will have to have a strict monitoring system to ensure that money set aside for improved sanitation is utilized properly.
At the same time, the importance of personal hygiene and of the need to keep drinking water clean, needs to be impressed upon children in their schools. The Orangi Pilot Project model of self-help and community involvement needs to be replicated on a large scale throughout the country.