January 09, 2008	Wednesday	Zilhaj 29, 1428

KARACHI, Jan 8: The Pakistan People’s Party on Tuesday expressed concerns about the “dismal economic performance” of the regime as reflected in the latest report of the State Bank of Pakistan as well as in the country’s worsening power crisis and depleting foreign exchange reserves, which has threatened future economic activities of the country.

Blaming the government for bringing the country to a point of no-return, Sherry Rehman, Central Information Secretary of the PPP, said here that experts’ fears about the country’s economic crisis were confirmed as the State Bank predicted a bleak picture of the economy, stressing that the country may not be able to meet the target growth rate, while the deficit may increase because of a number of factors.

“The country is currently going through an acute political crisis which is further deepened by the energy and wheat crises,” she said, adding that her party had been continuously pointing out the discrepancies in the economic management of the Musharraf-Aziz team.

“The country is being made to pay the price of consumer-led growth initiated by a regime that had an extremely narrow vision and never invested a rupee in the development of infrastructure. As a result, not only is the economy bearing the brunt of the regime’s inefficiencies, the common man is suffering the most because of the economic policies that neither represented his aspirations nor fulfilled his basic needs,” she said.

Ms Rehman observed that food inflation is acting as the biggest contributor to core inflation and the food prices and shortages today (despite surplus production of essential food items during the last year) are the same as experienced during times of war. “It is unfortunate that despite being an agrarian economy once enjoying surplus wheat production, food prices today are the highest in the history of the country,” he said.

She disclosed that a recent Household Integrated Economic Survey (HIES) revealed that the budget of an average citizen for the purchase of just 17 food items, including wheat, milk and vegetables, went up to 82.41 per cent because of the skyrocketing prices in 2005-06 compared to the year before.

“One shudders to think how the double digit inflation, haunting the economy for the last two years, must have pushed the expenditure on food items today. Obviously, this puts severe strain on the life of 74 per cent of the population that lives below the poverty line,” she observed.

Blame game

Ms Rehman said that it is indeed sinister on the part of the regime to blame the events that followed the tragic assassination of PPP chairperson Benazir Bhutto for the ongoing wheat crisis.

“The fact is that the wheat crisis had been brewing much before Mohtarma’s assassination. If anything, the Dec 27 tragedy is being used as an excuse by the regime to cover its own inefficiencies. For the last eight years, the regime has been running the economy on the basis of fudged figures and ad-hoc decisions. Now that the PML-Q is out of office, the people are realising the impact of the ‘mess management’ of the regime,” she said.

She called for the accountability of all those responsible for making a mess of the economy. “Any responsible government would have long ago resigned over the failures this regime has displayed in its performance. Instead, the regime not only continued, it wants to come back to power through rigged elections to continue to loot and plunder,” she said.

She warned against any move to gloss over the discrepancies in the economy by the regime and said that people deserved to know the facts in order to make their choice of a future government in the Feb 18 polls.

“After its successful efforts to bring the country to the brink of collapse, the PML-Q can only return to power on the basis of rigged elections,” she said.