Power to the people

DEMOCRATIC forces across the country, of whatever shade or political bent, have consistently condemned the concentration of power in the hands of one individual, specifically the head of state. The prime ministers that came and went since 1999 were little more than supporting acts for the man running the show. This arrangement flew in the face of the Constitution of Pakistan which calls for a parliamentary system in which the president plays a part of only ceremonial import. As president, army chief and all-round big gun, Mr Pervez Musharraf called all the shots in the tailored democracy he foisted on the country and which the citizenry roundly rejected last month at the hustings. This was to be expected in a relatively fair election, for the president’s hangers-on enjoyed little legitimacy in the public eye. The ‘King’s Party’ was crushed on Feb 18 and is now scrambling to regroup as an opposition force. Used to carefully scripted roles, the degree to which it can improvise in the changing political climate remains to be seen.

Elections, however, are only one component of the democratic process, not an end in themselves. They point to the path that ought to be adopted in accordance with the wishes of the people. What has been delivered is a split mandate, with the electorate making it clear that the country needs truly diverse and genuine representation, not a dictatorship of the majority. At least on the surface, the victorious People’s Party appears to understand that power must be shared to ensure national stability — not to mention its own survival — and to foster a system that is trusted by the people once the hard work of governance begins in earnest. Yet government formation is taking longer than expected as the PML-N, the second-largest party in parliament and the outright winner in Punjab, continues to ponder its options and the issues on which its opinion diverges from that of the PPP. It would bode well for the government and the federation if the PML-N were to accept responsibility for the actions of not just Punjab but also the centre. Given the deluge of problems facing the country — militancy, crime, inflation, poverty, energy shortage, the judicial crisis — the two biggest parties and their allies need to work together on all fronts, accepting blame for any mistakes and problems jointly instead of scoring points when it becomes politically expedient.

A reversion, as calmly as possible and without undue confrontation, to the vision of the 1973 Constitution is imperative. Here, responsibility for a smooth transition rests as much with the president as it does with the politicians. Mr Musharraf ought to accept whatever future direction the National Assembly may adopt, including the curtailment of his powers such as those wielded under Article 58-2(b). The parliamentary system has to reign supreme, for that is the will of the people and the law of the land. The cause of provincial autonomy must also be taken up as pledged, not just in name but with sincerity and vigour.

On the outskirts of Peshawar

EVEN the Khyber Agency seems to be slipping away from government control as the clash near Peshawar on Monday shows. The shootout, which resulted in at least 10 deaths, did not have political overtones. Nevertheless it is a reminder — if a reminder was at all needed — of the danger to society from religious extremism, even if it does not come from the Taliban. Today, the Lashkar-i-Islam is on the right side of the government in the sense that it has not aligned itself with the Taliban now waging their terror campaign in Pakistan and killing, besides security personnel, innocent men, women and children. On Monday, an LI-led group is reported to have targeted a four-century old shrine in the Shaikhan village. The other version is that the LI men did not attack the shrine; it was the other party that opened fire on an LI patrol. Whatever the casus belli, the fact is that the LI did not approve of the saint’s shrine and objected to prayers there because they thought all this went against Islam. There was, thus, bad blood between the LI men insisting on enforcing their brand of Sharia, and the other side which perhaps was closer to the Sufi tradition. The end-result of this kind of religious zeal was death and destruction.

There are several reasons why the authorities should draw correct conclusions from Monday’s blood-letting. First, the shootout occurred not in Fata or Swat but on the outskirts of the NWFP capital. That armed groups should try to enforce their writ on Peshawar’s suburbs reflects adversely on the efficiency of the law enforcement agencies and their political managers. Second, certain official quarters may be sympathetic to the LI at the moment because of its opposition to the Taliban. But this would be counterproductive in the long term, for once it discovers its strength the LI could become a problem for the government itself. The abduction of Ambassador Tariq Azizuddin and the authorities’ inability to recover him show how helpless the government is a stone’s throw away from Peshawar. As we have repeatedly said in these columns, religious extremism and militancy are a menace that cannot be crushed by the government alone. Basically, it is society that must take up the challenge. The intelligentsia must draw heart from the results of the Feb 18 general election: the people of Pakistan reject Talibanisation overwhelmingly.

Islamabad’s education city

AN education city, comprising academic institutions and a markaz, is being planned in a new sector of Islamabad away from the city centre. Meanwhile, funds for the development of another sector, also devoted to educational institutions on the pattern of several similar existing institutional sectors, has recently been approved. The two new sectors are located in the proximity of the existing sectors housing mainly private educational institutions and some public universities and colleges. Those private schools which are currently scattered in numerous residential sectors creating a traffic nuisance in their neighbourhoods, while serving the convenience of their students living nearby, are supposed to be relocated in one of the two new educational sectors. While it appears to make sense to concentrate most educational institutions in the same locality, it is another matter that many parents and students might prefer a more decentralised location for these institutions. After all, public schools and colleges in Islamabad are dispersed in various residential sectors, most of them having admission policies that give priority to residents living in the vicinity.

In the development of the proposed education city and the other new educational sector, it might be a good idea to consider the current problems being faced by students, parents and staff in the existing sectors where educational institutions are concentrated. One major problem is traffic congestion on the roads along which the institutions are located, particularly during student drop-off and pick-up times. This congestion is particularly acute where several schools are clustered together. Another major deficiency in the existing educational sectors is the lack of support facilities and services, such as common hostels, libraries, technology parks, sports and games centres, student counselling centres, bookshops and stationery shops. Until these deficiencies are addressed the establishment of another education city will not fully serve the purpose that it is meant to.

Doomsday in a vault

LAST week a massive tunnel in the Arctic named the ‘Doomsday Vault’ was announced. Essentially a giant refrigerator, it has been created to preserve millions of seeds from around the world.

Although, the cellar made global headlines for its size and scope, it was forgotten immediately after the great launch. In Pakistan and most other places, people were too overwhelmed or preoccupied by their immediate economic and political problems to notice.

News came from only a few consolidated sources, and details were scanty. There was opposition by NGOs and farmers’ movements, which was consistently ignored by the mainstream media.

On the surface, the undertaking appears innocuous. The vault’s stated purpose is protection against possible nuclear or other disasters that could destroy an entire region or even the world. In that unlikely event, survivors will not have to die from an agricultural collapse. They will be able to immediately source seeds from the vault to start food production all over again. At least that is the theory. Faulty, though.

Will there be enough indigenous seeds in the vault to help jumpstart an entire region or even one country within several seasons? No, there aren’t. All seeds would not apply in all areas. While natural disasters can devastate vast acreages, they have not been known to completely destroy all life including humans, making the whole vault exercise seem fruitless. So why did over 200 governments and territories swallow the story and contribute?

It’s not the first time that ignorance has led to questionable choices. Nor the first time for decision-makers to knowingly or unknowingly play to the tune of global commercial interests. Since the food crop itself is its own seed, such as rice, wheat, maize, or is contained within the plant, it’s been easy for farmers to save seeds. The diversity is mind-boggling; each plant coming not in dozens or hundreds of varieties but in thousands of species. Thus there are 40,000 rice varieties in a 200-mile belt of central India alone, 10,000 wheat varieties in China, 1500 banana varieties, a thousand kinds of Peruvian potatoes and most of these are disappearing due to disuse in the 21st century.

Such diversity is a result of plants adapting to a vast range of environmental conditions; where nature occurs at its richest, varieties of the same plant appear every mile or so and respond to the minutest local variations and proportions of combined factors, even at different heights within the same forest. Biodiversity therefore offered people crops specific to their own niche, which in turn were cross-bred with neighbouring plant relatives to obtain the best.

Modern agriculture was directly responsible for destroying biodiversity. Traditional farmers planted between a few dozen to a hundred crops in the same field not only because combined productivity was several times higher than monoculture but also because health and renewability were guaranteed. But when ‘industrial’ farming methods started putting single crops in a field where many already existed, millions of the removed species were rendered extinct. Deceived by a higher but short-lived output, the entire world allowed this system to engulf it. Three-fourths of the world’s diversity was lost. What survives is only because valiant farmers have stubbornly struggled to maintain it.

The unfortunately named Doomsday Vault is not the first gene bank, although it is the first of its kind. Gene banks were started by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a subtle amalgamation of international and private institutions. In effect, they only served commercial organisations seeking raw material. CGIAR ran 15 global gene banks for the most common staple food crops as a ‘trusteeship on behalf of the international community’ –– although the communities were never asked permission or compensated for what they had selected, developed, and shared among themselves over generations and centuries.

Vault rules claim that only depositors or a private or commercial organisation authorised by them can access their own collections. But the fine print does not allow access to hands-on farmers. The justification is that as traditional varieties get replaced by newly-developed ones, which only emerge from corporate laboratories, the traditional, natural varieties should be stored away for sourcing fresh genes.

Yet farmers are not encouraged to save self-grown seed in its own habitat! That would not serve the handful of seed multinationals already controlling over half the world’s US$30bn annual commercial seed market. The benefit goes to scientists serving corporations, not farmers. In other words, intellectual property rights can only be negotiated between governments and the seed industry. The entire mechanism is so elaborately blanketed with humanitarian rhetoric that it is easy to fool the non-agricultural mind.

The sheer logistics and legal restrictions involved simply cannot grant easy access to developing countries. It would have made more sense and been far more economical to support small indigenous farmers to cultivate and save more indigenous seed locally. For traditional farmers, the safest and healthiest seed bank has always been ‘in situ’ or on site within the native environment.

There are some 1500 ‘ex situ’ or ‘off-site’ seed banks around the world, mostly failing for lack of funds or the wrong approach. Only three of the 19 depositor institutes – all of CGIAR – registered with the vault, are from the Third World. They have often been accused of simply being conduits for multinational seed corporations.

After all, what followed was that many Western companies, especially American, were inserting a token gene or two from other species and patenting native varieties as their own exclusive property. Previously, seeds in most so-called gene banks were part of the ‘public domain’ which made them easy to access. How else did outsiders get to patent native South Asian varieties such as ‘Neem’, turmeric, basmati rice and much more?

Within three decades, the campaign for an ex-situ ‘world gene bank’ has succeeded. But the ‘in-situ’ campaign by farmers’ movements over the past half-century, which calls for on-farm strategies, continues to be ignored. Pakistan, where biodiversity is severely threatened, has made generous seed contribution to the vault – without parliamentary or public debate on sovereign public goods, not even with farmers.

What is the need, for example, to deposit 15,000 unique varieties of cowpeas, already being cultivated over 600 million acres and vital to the food security of 88 developing countries, in an isolated icebox? Perhaps it is because of their combined value of $100bn which is not in corporate hands yet?

Norway is one of the few countries the world would trust with sovereign seeds. The same cannot be said for the other actors. Norway is funding the entire construction as a global service. But the money trail for the maintenance of the vault and other services leads chillingly to the same institutions that imposed chemical and GM monoculture, bringing social and environmental devastation in their wake. These include the several Rockefeller foundations and Ford Foundation, which already control most of the world’s private seed banks, USAID, the world’s four biggest multinationals in seeds and agro-chemicals, and now the Bill Gates Foundation as well.

Eight days before the ‘Doomsday Vault’ opened formally, the archipelago where it is situated was hit by an earthquake of 6.2 magnitude, the most intense in Norway’s history. However, the feasibility study claims that there was ‘no volcanic or significant seismic activity’ in the area. Was Nature showing its disapproval on behalf of the billions who wouldn’t dare?

OTHER VOICES - Middle East Press

Arab News

WHAT Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza can and should be called a war crime, genocide, and to borrow from the lexicon of one Israeli official, a holocaust….

Not only have more Palestinians been murdered in the past five days than at any other time in the past eight years,… tough voices from Israel say that the slaughter will continue, that Israel has still not hit Hamas hard enough and that a full-scale invasion of Gaza is coming up….

It would be suicidal for Israel to invade Gaza. Israel and its friends may not mind the huge number of casualties in a ground offensive but can the Jewish state ensure that reoccupying the Gaza Strip would put an end to the rocket fire on Sderot, Ashkelon and their environs?

From a historical point of view, there can be no solution to the problem of Gaza as long as there is not at least a modicum of hope for these desperate people somewhere on the horizon.

The idea would be to reopen the Gaza-Egyptian border at Rafah under renewed European monitoring, allow Gazan exports through Rafah, push the Egyptians to patrol the border better, release the captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, and arrange a cease-fire in Gaza, with Hamas promising to stop rockets in return for a halt in Israeli military action.

The situation is getting worse, with Gaza essentially still closed to normal commerce, with severe shortages of oil, gasoline, medicine and chlorine for drinking water…. — (March 3)

A matter of training

The Egyptian Gazette

ACCORDING to latest statistics from the Central Agency for Population, Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), unemployment hit 9.01 per cent in the last quarter of 2007, despite the recent increase in investment projects, which, however, have failed to create sufficient jobs to reduce the unemployment rate.

The reason for this failure is a growing dependence on foreign workers in different industrial sectors, especially the textiles and weaving sector. Around 50 per cent of the labour force in factories in the new cities of el-Obour…el-Sadat and Bourg el-Arab are foreigners, from countries like Bangladesh, China and Turkey.

However, a lack of training programmes and poor technical education programmes have led to more unemployment and a rise in the demand for highly trained workers.

The wide gap between the education system and what the market needs might explain why the Egyptians have yet to taste the fruits of economic reforms. Having a lot of foreign labourers might not influence our demographic map, unlike in some Gulf states, but it will surely influence the social and economic stability of the country.

We need new legislation to safeguard the rights of Egyptian workers, so that they can be trained in the latest technology by these foreign investors who still enjoy privileges like cheap raw materials and subsidised energy, along with the free transfer of their profits back to their countries. — (March 4)