| 25 January 2005 | Tuesday | 14 Zilhaj 1425 |
Heil Harry
Fresh debate on two-nation theory
Politics of food and corporate farming
There is now some talk in Pakistan about using the available fiscal space for alleviating poverty. This space has appeared as a result of the policies adopted in the last several years by the administration of President Pervez Musharraf and the availability of large amounts of external flows to the country following 9/11.
How should Islamabad address the problem of poverty? An answer to this question requires a context. This I will provide in the series of articles beginning today. Ever so often the global community gets concerned about global poverty.
It is worried once again, and this time, for two reasons. The first reason is the enormous amount of destruction wrought by the earthquake near the island of Sumatra in Indonesia on December 26.
The tremor produced tsunami waves that brought death and destruction to many parts of Southeast and South Asia. The latest death count is 220,000; more than 170,000 in Indonesia, mainly in the restive province of Aceh.
The surging sea destroyed the livelihood of two to three million citizens in half a dozen countries. By several counts, this was one of the most destructive natural disasters in human history.
It took some time for the industrial world to comprehend the full scale of what had occurred. The American response was particularly poor - "stingy" in the words of a United Nations' official. Washington initially offered $35 million of assistance.
Spurred on by criticism, the United States went into action, increasing the amount of aid promised to $350 million along with an appeal by President George W. Bush to the private sector to give as much money as it could afford.
Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were called in to help mobilize money from private donors. More important, the US deployed its naval fleet in the Pacific to launch an impressive rescue and relief operation.
As one Marine soldier put it, "it is great to be helping people in distress rather than killing suspected enemies in the battlefield." With this effort the US may have won more hearts and minds in the Muslim world than with all the attention given to reforming the Greater Middle East.
By the middle of the current month, the total amount of assistance promised by governments, non-government organizations, and people around the world who watched the tragedy unfold on their TV screens climbed to more than $2 billion or about $1,000 per head of the affected population.
At this point a different kind of worry began to be expressed by the development community: that the pouring of money and sympathy directed at the tsunami victims may deflect attention from the all too pervasive problem of global poverty.
As Jeffrey Sachs wrote in a newspaper article published on the eve of the release of his report on global poverty commissioned by UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, "the point is simple.
Consider malaria, a silent tsunami whose devastation washes over Africa at a proportion that dwarfs the recent Indian Ocean tsunami. Each month more than 150,000 African children die of malaria; that is about the death toll of the Asian disaster.
Yet those deaths do not sear the public's mind. Off camera, they are largely unknown." There was a fear that the needs of the perennial poor around the globe would be neglected if not altogether forgotten.
Their everyday plight did not make good television coverage and did not produce the kind of attention and resources bestowed on the tsunami victims. The second reason for the revival of some interest in global poverty is the publication of the report produced by the UN as a part of its "Millennium Project".
I will have more to say about this report and its many conclusions in the coming weeks. Today, I will provide some background and some history about this renewed interest in global poverty.
The incidence of poverty around the globe has remained stubbornly at the same level for decades, at about a billion people. This number has remained more or less unchanged since Robert McNamara, the World Bank president for 13 years from 1968 to 1981, began publicizing it in his annual speeches.
Its distribution has changed. While parts of Asia - including China and India but, unfortunately, not Pakistan - have made impressive strides in reducing the levels of poverty, the situation in sub-Saharan Africa has continued to worsen.
McNamara's approach to the problem of global poverty was a simple one. The world's rich nations must give more in terms of aid to the world's poor. How much should be expected from the rich by the poor? By that time McNamara began to direct the world's attention to global poverty, a consensus had emerged according to which it was the moral obligation of well-to-do countries to set aside at least one per cent of their gross domestic product as economic assistance for poor countries.
McNamara not only provided updates on the number of people living in poverty in his annual addresses to the World Bank's board of governors. He also included in the text of his speeches a table that gave the amount of aid provided by each industrial country.
The table had both absolute amounts as well as the proportion of gross domestic product these amounts represented. The idea was to shame the laggard countries into taking action to move towards the consensus number of one per cent of GDP.
The United States was then one of the laggard nations. In terms of absolute amounts, it was the leading provider of aid up until the late eighties when it lost that position to Japan.
In terms of the proportion of gross domestic product, it was way behind countries such as Norway and the Netherlands that began to approach the one per cent GDP target. By the end of the 20th century, aid as a proportion of national income had fallen to just 0.1 per cent.
What was to be done with the aid provided to poor nations? McNamara had an answer to this question as well in each of his annual speeches. However, the answer continued to change as he and the institution over which he then presided learnt more about the likely solutions to the problem of poverty.
In 1973, McNamara addressed the World Bank's annual meeting in Nairobi in which he committed his institution to investing a great deal of money in what he called "rural development".
Two years later, he followed with an address on urban poverty and urban development. He was giving up on the idea of "trickle down" which was the main strategy that was then being pursued by the World Bank and most other development institutions.
According to this, all that needed to be done was to accelerate the pace of growth in the developing world. With growth, more resources would become available more or less automatically for the poor.
Pakistan's Mahbubul Haq had contributed to the promotion of this idea. In the late sixties, he took some time off from the Planning Commission to write a book on the strategy of development Pakistan had followed during the period of the Second Five Year Plan, 1960-65.
During this time, Pakistan had broken loose from most of the developing world by growing at a rate of close to 6.5 per cent a year. This was a remarkable performance; this is particularly so when viewed from the perspective of today's Pakistan.
Pakistan began to be talked about as a miracle economy and Mahbubul Haq correctly concluded that its performance needed to be explained to an admiring world. His book was well received in the development community. His thesis was simple. It had three parts.
One, Pakistan had succeeded by focusing its energy and the resources available to it on growth. Two, the state had a major role to play in directing the available resources towards the sectors and into the enterprises it determined as the leading sectors and leading enterprises for producing growth.
Three, there was no need to focus directly on the poor. They would automatically benefit from growth; resources would trickle down to them once growth got going. There were some problems with this thesis some of which Mahbubul Haq himself identified at a later date. However, the most important defect with this strategy of growth was its excessive reliance on external flows of capital.
One reason why Pakistan did so well was that Ayub Khan's foreign policy attracted a great deal of development assistance into the country, in particular from the United States.
Ayub's Pakistan had turned itself into an important link in the chain that President Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were busy putting in place to contain the spread of communism to South and Southeast Asia.
Ayub Khan's willingness to have his country become such a link was handsomely rewarded by Washington with large amounts of military and economic aid. The same was to happen in the case of Ziaul Haq's Pakistan and the country under General Pervez Musharraf.
But I should return to the story of poverty. Mahbubul Haq had an agile mind. Not too long after his book was published, he turned his entire thesis on its head. In a famous speech delivered in Karachi as the government of Ayub Khan was heading towards a major political crisis, Haq told his surprised audience that trickle down had not worked in Pakistan.
It had not succeeded in addressing the problem of poverty and income inequality by giving so much attention to growth, he declared. The remarkable rate of GDP growth during the period of Ayub Khan, he maintained, had not helped the poor. It had only made the rich richer.
In fact, much of the benefit of growth had gone to some 22 families that had obtained a sizable proportion of incremental income and wealth produced during Ayub Khan's "decade of development."
The "22 family speech" electrified not only Pakistan but much of the development community around the globe. It laid the basis for the destructive nationalization of large-scale industry, finance and commerce by the administration of President/ Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that took office in December 1971, 21 months after the resignation of Ayub Khan.
But Mahbubul Haq's new thinking also had a positive impact. After giving the speech in Karachi, he joined the World Bank and became President McNamara's most influential adviser on development policy. From that vantage point, he was able to influence the thinking of the World Bank president.
The meaning of rural and urban development continued to evolve under President McNamara. The main element of this approach was that the poor should be provided with productive employment opportunities.
But the focus on employment generation in the sectors of the economy did not produce a dent in the incidence of poverty. Could it be that the poor did not have the wherewithal - education, skills and good health - to benefit from the attention they were receiving? Shouldn't the state also address the important question of improving the capacity of the poor to work productively?
With these two questions in the background, another twist was added to the strategy for alleviating poverty. In the late seventies, Mahbubul Haq and his associates, including myself, came up with what came to be called the "basic needs strategy."
It was concluded that the state had to be actively involved in helping the poor with the provision of five basic needs: food, basic education, primary heath care, water and sanitation and shelter.
Just as this thinking was developing, the developing world went into a tail-spin with the first of several debt crises. I will pick up the story from here next week.
Heil Harry
Prince harry is the son of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana. After his father and his elder brother, William he is in line for the throne. He is twenty years old and has done his A-levels at Eton and is due to pursue further education at Sand hurst.
His life has been measured out. So far so good but Prince Harry has had to live through the trauma of his mother's death, killed in a car crash in Paris and has had to endure the considerable grieving that followed the death as did much gossip.
In the best of circumstances, his upbringing could not have been normal. It isn't even if one has been born with a silver spoon in one's mouth. But Prince Harry lives in the fast lane. He has admitted to smoking cannabis at the age of 16 and claims to have lashed out a photographer outside a London night club.
He is in the news again and it is a big time for there are international implications, a somewhat sad story of how trivia can be worked up and made to feel as if the world has fallen off its axis.
Prince Harry went to a fancy dress party dressed in the uniform of the Afrika Corps and wearing a red, white and black swastika armband. In other words he dressed as a Nazi.
All hell broke loose and it was as if the Battle of Britain was being fought all over again. The loudest protests came from Jewish groups who seem to see this act by a twenty year old as an endorsement of the Holocaust. Buckingham Palace apologized for this gaffe but it was clearly not enough.
Mr John Howard, leader of the Conservative Party who might have more understanding led the pack. He was not satisfied with the apology and argued that the prince should account for his actions in public.
Mr Howard is of Romanian Jewish parentage - a proof that what is bred in the bones comes out in the flesh. Silvan Shalom, the Israeli foreign minister said: "Anybody who tries to pass it off as bad taste must be made aware that this can encourage others to think that perhaps that period was not as bad as teach the young generation in the free world."
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre urged the prince to visit Auschwitz for instructions in the horrors of the Nazi regime. While Doug Henderson, a Labour backbencher and former armed forces minister said the incident demonstrated that Prince Harry was unfit to go to Sandhurst and called for him to withdraw his application.
The incident has been blown out of all proportions. People go to fancy dress parties in the most outlandish costumes and some even dressed as gorillas. By wearing a Nazi uniform, Prince Harry who wasn't born till well after World War-II could have been taking the micky out of the Nazis.
Perhaps, it is not too well known that there is a Nazi party in the United States and it parades in uniform and is protected by the US Constitution. It is not a crime to belong to the Nazi party.
The Jews of the world have every right to remember the Holocaust with horror and great anger. It was one of the most vile acts of all times and represents genocide as a state policy.
But why is Jewish sense of outrage and fury not directed at those who persecuted them and those countries that watched without raising a voice of disapproval? And why is the Jewish state of Israel treating Palestinians as if they were Jews in Nazi Germany? Would there have been the same indignation if Prince Harry had dressed up as an Israeli soldier?
The Israeli-Palestine conflict goes back many years but it has taken out a new impetus since 9/11 and Ariel Sharon has been emboldened to implement his Greater Israel agenda with the tacit encouragement of the Americans because he claims to be fighting the war against terror.
Far from returning the lands stolen from the Palestinians, he is embarked on a programme to make Palestinians stranger in their own land and I am wondering if it has ever struck him that what he is doing could not be too much different to what the Nazis might have done.
As for the British, there is a far more danger to their values in the way that Muslims are being treated than there is in Prince Harry dressing up as a Nazi. Britain is one of the most tolerant countries but now cracks are beginning to appear.
It has taken a fairly long time for Tony Blair to condemn the prisoner abuse by some British soldiers in Basra. At the moment this prisoner abuse is confined to a few soldiers but it stands to reason that many more soldiers were involved and one is inclined to believe that the orders came from higher up.
How high one is not able to say. The Americans went into the war in Iraq for their own reasons and it has become amply clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
My own gut-feeling is that the British government too knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction. There is an unwillingness to admit that it is necessary, from time to time, for governments to be economical with the truth. Perhaps, Prince Harry can be made the scapegoat.
Fresh debate on two-nation theory
Few political themes have excited so much controversy in recent times as the two nation theory that has suddenly emerged as the country's mid-life crisis. Hardly a week passes without some newspaper or the other publishing letters on this subject.
The approach ranges from the cloyingly parochial, with the occasional knee-jerk leftist reaction, to the pragmatic, expressed in a stifling intellectual smugness which suggests that something surreptitious and dangerous is going on and that the people are being unnecessarily drawn into an issue which should have remained buried.
The first politician to have sounded the death knell of the two nation theory in the last 35 years was the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, shortly after Pakistan lost its eastern wing in the 1971 war. The issue simmered for a while, but discussion, though often angry and inflammatory, was largely academic.
People in the former western wing of the country were given the distinct impression by the newly formed PPP government, backed by the bureaucracy, the military and members of the feudal class who were terrified that the Bengalis might make claims that East Pakistan had always been something of a liability, and that the westerners were far better off after having cut the umbilical chord.
In the heat of the moment, a number of issues were cheerfully forgotten. Issues like which wing had been earning more foreign exchange; where were most of the earnings being spent; and why was Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, whose Awami League had emerged as the majority party, not appointed prime minister of a united Pakistan.
The pertinent question that was asked at the time was: do language and social customs provide a more potent force than religion in forging cohesion and national unity? In fact, it was generally felt a chapter had been closed in the history of a country that constantly lived from one crisis to another. Except for an occasional article in an esoteric foreign journal, the two nation theory remained more or less dormant.
That is until the MQM leader rekindled the issue in his recent speech in New Delhi, contending that the purpose of the creation of Pakistan had not been served and the spirit and ideology of the two nation theory stood defied as protection and security had not been provided to either immigrants from India or to Muslim Indians in their own country.
Predictably, the speech stirred up a hornet's nest, evoked mixed reactions in parts of Pakistan and triggered a flow of letters in the press that ruffled quite a few feathers.
Kunwar Khalid Yunus asked the pertinent question: why was the Meo community that wanted to migrate from Rajputana, forcibly sent back to India? Syed Ahsanul Haque wanted to know why the Pakistan government never approached the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to secure a reasonable subsistence allowance for the Pakistanis stranded in Bangladesh.
And Professor Ishtiaq Ahmed pointed out that the crucial election of 1946 was based on limited franchise, and only those who paid a certain amount of income tax, land revenue or possessed minimum educational qualifications were entitled to vote.
Non-immigrant members of the upper class, who are beneficiaries of the current system, made most of the rebuttals, like the comprehensive one offered by A.H.Mir from Lahore Cantonment.
Expressed in simple language, the two nation theory states that Hindus and Muslims are two separate nations with distinct religious and cultural identities, and Muslims should have a separate homeland in the Muslim majority areas of the subcontinent.
After partition, learned tomes were written pointing out why this did not happen and how events conspired to the eventual establishment of the first sovereign ideological Islamic state.
What is interesting, however, is the frequent use that is made of quotations from the founder of the nation by current advocates of the two nation theory. "History has presented to us many examples, such as the union of Great Britain and Ireland, of Czechoslovakia and Poland.
History has also shown us many geographical tracts, much smaller than the subcontinent of India, which otherwise might have been called one country, but which have been divided into as many as seven or eight sovereign states. Likewise, the Portuguese and the Spanish stand divided in the Iberian Peninsula."
Fakir Ahmed Paracha writing from Peshawar made the astute observation that the two-nation theory is not of recent import and can be traced back to the 11th century. According to the distinguished scholar Al-Beruni Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literature.
They have different views of life and death. The foe of one is often the hero of the other. They do not inter-marry or dine together and belong to two different civilizations, based on conflicting ideas and conceptions.
Surprisingly, none of the letter writers pointed out that the two-nation theory surfaced early in Sindh when G.M. Syed introduced the Pakistan Resolution in the Sindh Assembly on March 3, 1943.
But it would be germane to mention, without taking the reader through a fearsome array of political arguments that in 1972, G.M. Syed repudiated the two-nation theory by proposing the formation of a secular, multi-ethnic republic in which those who subscribed to the concept would become citizens of Sindhudesh, irrespective of when they migrated to Sindh and where they came from.
He also prescribed remedies similar to those that existed in the Soviet satellite states for the removal of social injustices. This possibly explains why a close affinity existed between the leaders of the MQM and the Jeeay Sindh movement, both of whom vehemently opposed feudalism.
As M.S. Korejo pointed out in his fine book on this historical figure, Syed was a staunch believer in secular politics and opposed the theory that Islam and politics were inseparable.
He firmly believed that a state based on religion would encourage sectarianism, as each sect would seek the enforcement of its own laws of Shariah. If the majority sect tried to impose its will on the minority sects, this would result in alienation.
And if separate laws governed each community there would be chaos leading to fragmentation, bloodshed and civil strife. Religious elites would have the upper hand in preparing and enforcing codes and laws - which would create tremendous problems within the judicial system.
Syed traced the roots of sectarian turmoil to four major events: basing the creation of Pakistan on the two-nation theory; the suppression of Jinnah's speech made in the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, declaring secularism as the guiding principle of Pakistan's Constitution; the introduction of the Objectives Resolution by Liaquat Ali Khan; and the declaration of Pakistan as an Islamic state by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto under pressure from the Muslim clergy.
Syed's concept of nationalism also repudiated Dr Iqbal's concept of Islamic socialism, which as any student of philosophy or religion would point out is a contradiction in terms.
The main thrust of the letter writers in the current dispute centres on four controversial issues. If Pakistan was created for the Muslims of the subcontinent, why were so many sent back in the early years after partition? Why was selective criteria employed to decide on the province from which they should be allowed to migrate to the land of the pure?
Continuing the same argument, why are Indian Muslims not given sanctuary in this country and imprisoned when they overstay their visit? And, why are the Pakistanis who were left behind in Bangladesh, and who have been stranded for 33 years in camps, for committing no crime other than that of supporting the Pakistan army, not being repatriated to this country? After all, weren't captured Pakistani soldiers and other personnel sent home after being released, and don't Afghans, who are not Pakistanis, enjoy indefinite right of abode in Pakistan?
These are compelling and seductive arguments which no apologist for the Pakistan government has been able to satisfactorily counter, and which those that did manage to get away and cross the great divide and have subsequently prospered in industry, business, government and the armed forces, would rather not discuss.
The imprisonment-on-overstaying argument is particularly irksome. Letter writers have repeatedly quoted the case of Israel, another state created on the basis of religion, which has an open door immigration policy on Jews, irrespective of the colour of their skin and the country in which they are currently residing.
For the present, Dr Ziauddin Ahmed's terse observation that 1947 marked not only the partition of India but also the partition of the Muslims hasn't been contradicted. It certainly looks like things are going to continue in the same strain.
Politics of food and corporate farming
Recently there was a flurry of frantic government advertisements assuring the business sector that during 2005, Pakistan will not be affected by imports of duty-free agricultural products; no subsidies forbidden (that is, to big farmers; peasants don't get any).
Nor will stricter standards imposed by the World Trade Organization (WTO) throw Pakistan out of the competition for foreign markets. Total free trade won't be introduced nor import duties reduced to zero; therefore Pakistani industry will not collapse.
Smallholders, NGOs and activists might have cheered had these assurances not been time-bound. The government did not say, however, that all of this would not happen eventually - merely that people had only a year left for some damage control.
Coincidentally or not, shortly before these ads appeared, the government announced it was putting corporate farming through to attract foreign investment. It had already decided on this several years ago; but after 9/11 and Afghanistan and no one in a hurry to come to Pakistan the idea was quietly shelved - until now. Nineteen foreign applications are awaiting, claim insiders.
The belated assurance-by-advertisement is small consolation at this eleventh hour. The Pakistan government had a decade in which to inform and educate the citizens about the WTO's pros and cons, and initiate public and parliamentary debate before unilaterally and blindly signing the WTO Agreement on Agriculture in 1995.
To this day - apart from the rumour floating that since other southern countries were signing it, the WTO had to be good enough for Pakistan too - no one cares to take credit for this questionable decision. Without studying the implications in depth, a mid-level bureaucrat is said to have been sent to sign the deal.
Even then, it was not too late to re-examine what the WTO really had to offer - or rather, extract. Thanks to the predilection of governments to leave everything to politicians or "experts" or finance ministers whether or not well-informed, and who seldom endure the wrong end of the economic stick, the public largely remained ignorant about the WTO except about the most contentious part of all on agriculture.
Historically, apart from colonization which was against local will, whatever deals were made with foreign investors or traders, countries never permitted outside control over agriculture because it is the very foundation of economies.
A continuous and adequate source of food and adequate employment has to be ensured if governments are not to worry about constant conflict, instability and being overthrown. The history of warfare, which often turns out to be economic history, is replete with the issue of food security as catalyst.
Even the Americans are fond of reiterating that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Their short history documents top political leaders, various Congressmen, military generals and high-ranking intellectuals repeatedly driving home the strategy that to control other nations one had to control their food supply, namely, through agriculture.
And that is exactly what they have been doing for over a century. Even tsunami victims need to look some gift horses in the mouth, as the famine experience of the Zimbabwe demonstrated, when the US sought to dump unwanted and risky GM food "aid" that would have contaminated the country's agriculture and environment and threatened their biodiversity.
Yet many southern governments - unlike the shrewder industrialized nations - give short shrift to peasants, overlooking their natural advantage in agriculture, simply to maintain the land monopoly status quo for a minority.
Monopolies are supposedly banned the world over; so when citizens question the legitimacy of the WTO oligopoly, why do southern governments come down heavily in the defence of WTO instead of the people? - even though WTO is not an organization of governments like the United Nations or Saarc or Asean.
The WTO is a private, corporate club - a sort of global contractor, except that rather than consulting with governments, it lays down the law and tells governments what to do.
Its foundations were laid by a dozen or so American multinational corporations, seeking open and unregulated borders for trade and foreign investment especially in agriculture, intellectual property rights and services.
The "founding fathers" included the two most aggressive American banks, American manufacturers, investment and services associations, and their International Chamber of Commerce.
Economic and financial control overseas has long been part of US foreign policy, and the corporate sector not only had full government support, their bureaucracy even paved the way for them.
Nevertheless, since WTO was a private grouping, the peoples of agricultural developing countries did not have to go along with it; but their governments did - secretively and arbitrarily.
Apart from big countries such as Brazil and India, it was not difficult to persuade most southern governments to join the WTO "voluntarily." Those headed by dictators were among the earliest catches.
Others - including authoritarian "democracies" - would unexpectedly find urgently needed loans from World Bank or other trade deal or assistance suddenly held up or cancelled if they were hesitant about the WTO. Such arm-twisting was routine across the board.
Throughout the seven years leading to the formation of the WTO (known as the Uruguay Round) the industrialized countries earned notoriety for their closed-door "green room meetings" which firmly excluded the South from participating and negotiating as "equals."
The North made the decisions privately beforehand among themselves, informing southern representatives about it later - whether they liked it or not. Consequently, most governments are yet to read and fully comprehend the several thousand pages of the WTO agreement.
US and WTO spokespersons constantly justify the creation of WTO on the grounds that a global body was needed to coordinate an entire world's overwhelming volume and complexities of trade, therefore, manufacture and other production as well, since not just finished goods but raw materials and components and services were also traded.
True, but the United Nations Council for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) already existed and working in the relevant areas and would have been the next logical step towards coordinating and monitoring balanced global trade. But balance was not the objective of corporate interests and superpower foreign policy, and they bristled at being monitored.
In 1972, the mounting high-handed behaviour of many multinationals riding roughshod over sovereign governments, climaxed with an American corporation actually offering the CIA or anyone else a million dollars to overthrow Salvador Allende of Chile who appealed to the UN for justice.
Ultimately, a small new UN office was set up known as the Centre for Transnational Corporations (UNCTC). The UNCTC started off by helping some southern governments work out some non-binding principles for foreign investment and documenting the nature of foreign investment in their countries.
This was too much for the multinationals who saw an international compulsory code for corporations in the offing, but who refused to be accountable to either the UN or governments.
The lobbying and bad-mouthing of the UNCTC forced the hand of Boutros Boutros Ghali who had sought to defend the justified interests of a beleaguered South, to close down the centre in 1992. Later, the US blocked the popular choice of Boutros Ghali returning as secretary general for another term in favour of a more pliant one.
The many global people's movements are demanding the restoration of people's natural right to grow food for themselves so as to be self-reliant, and not be forced by policies or outside interests to reduce them to a floating, insecure mass of permanently-exploited temporary labour in a way of life not of their choosing; it is an obvious violation of human and civil rights.
For, multinationals control the use of 80 per cent of the world's farmland which are cultivated for export-oriented crops, causing displacement of the rural population.
Just 10 agro-based corporations control 70-90 per cent of global seed, grain, chemical fertilizer and pesticide production and trade. That leaves very little option for the world's four billion peasants, small farmers and other rural people but to starve.
Above all, they demand, not that WTO's agreement on agriculture be renegotiated for concessions which is the most that apathetic southern governments seek, but that agriculture be taken out of WTO completely.
Food security, they contend - and it is impossible to dispute - is non-negotiable, and there is no such thing as a "right" to invest in or trade with others if basic needs are threatened; only surplus should be tradeable by mutually-agreed on choice, subject to change when citizens interests were compromised; without this principle, there can be no sovereignty.
If there is to be a judge or an arbitrator, it has to be the UN. A food-dependent, poor or not-so-rich country can never be in a bargaining position let alone dictate terms - which explain the present plight of many countries including Pakistan. This will be the final test of democracy: the public interest.