PAKISTAN has more livestock than it does school-going children; it ignores the potential inherent in both.

According to the Pakistan Livestock Census 2006, our population of buffaloes and cattle has increased (despite our being a nation of carnivores) from 40 million in 1996 to 56 million today. Our children lag far behind — as students are wont to do on their way to school — at 33 million.

These figures might have remained mere statistics in the malleable hands of economists, had the recent Economic Survey of 2007-08 not alerted us to the situation affecting our forgotten majority — the rural sector. The preamble to the Economic Survey is a master’s dissertation in double-speak, using phrases such as ‘negative growth’. It begins with the confident assertion that “Pakistan’s economy posted a robust growth of 5.8 per cent in 2007-08”, and then unveils the reality, “as against 6.8 per cent last year and this year’s target of 7.2 per cent”. It continues this ‘Dance of the Tattered Veils’ with the statement that “three-fourth of this year’s growth came from the services sector alone with only one-fourth from the commodity producing sector”. A services sector-led growth was, it explains, “entirely driven by consumption, particularly private consumption”.

It tells us that macroeconomic indicators of significant sectors all missed their targets. Out of the seventeen that were listed, those that should have gone up — manufacturing, investment, national savings, agricultural production, tax revenues — went down, while others such as government borrowing, overall fiscal deficit, foreign exchange reserves, and inflation were shown to be facing in the wrong direction.

Our economic performance has collapsed from the highs it saw four or five years ago, when our GDP growth was vaunted at 8.6 per cent (now 5.8 per cent), agriculture at 6.7 per cent (now 1.5 per cent), manufacturing at 14 per cent (now 5.4 per cent), and large-scale manufacturing at 18.1 per cent (now 4.8 per cent).The only sector that has remained constant without declining has been the services sector.

The Economic Survey censures our planners for focusing on our four major crops — wheat, cotton, sugar cane and rice — that contribute only 34 per cent of our agricultural value added, instead of on the livestock and dairy sectors that account for 52 per cent. The Economic Survey laments that this year we have 1.2 million fewer cotton bales to sustain our textile industry, our wheat has dwindled by 1.6 million tonnes with which to feed our queuing millions, and we have produced more sugar cane — 63.9 million tonnes, which is almost 17 per cent higher than last year — than we need to assuage our national sweet tooth.

And yet, it is our neglected, voiceless livestock that has come to our rescue this year. Aware that it shoulders the yoke of 52 per cent of our agricultural value added, it has grown on its own, almost unaided, by an unsung 3.8 per cent.

Could it be that our salvation lies not in our faltering industry, nor on the unproductive services sector, but in agro-industries? Is there any justification in repeating our past, by using agriculture, as our colonial masters once taught us to do, as a feeder of under-priced cotton for mills in Lancashire? Ought we to continue supplying under-priced cotton to our local textile mills, without exploring the alternative? Will we ever be able to break the supply chain that shackles our agricultural output and its versatile potential to the demands of our implacable industrial juggernaut?

Many years ago India, faced with a parallel predicament, took a conscious decision to develop its livestock sector. From being a milk deficient country in the 1960s, it has become the world’s largest producer of milk. This in itself would have been commendable enough, until one realises that the total bovine population in India has increased over a span of 50 years from 198 million per head in 1951 to only 283 million per head in 2003.

India produces 90 million tonnes of milk (Indian animals are more forthcoming), out of which about 46 per cent is consumed as liquid milk and almost the same quantity is converted into by-products such as butter, ghee, khoya, paneer, etc. We produce 34 million tonnes, and we could induce our livestock to produce much more. On a DawnNews programme recently, an expert panellist was asked whether the inordinately low and inefficient milk yields were the fault of the animal or of the farmer. His spontaneous answer was: “The government’s!” And in a sense, he was right.

Bovines cannot formulate policies, and farmers are not always allowed to. It is for the government to determine priorities, to create the enabling environment, to set achievable targets. Whether the government does it or the farming community — we have to be weaned back to milk. We may need to do so sooner than we think. Our exports are lopsided heavily in favour of textiles. They account for 57 per cent of our total exports. During 2007-08, they declined by 2.5 per cent, despite R&D funding by the government to assist diversification and valued-added products.

The only sector that showed an appreciable increase in exports was the food sector that grew by 22.4 per cent, but that was largely because of the bonanza in international rice prices. Wheat as a commodity appears both in our exports and in our imports. Seduced by a bumper crop of 23.3 million tonnes in 2006-07, we exported wheat, and then had to import 1.6 million tonnes of it at a loss of Rs40bn. That singular miscalculation cost 6.7 million children their education last year.

We imported two million tonnes of fertiliser — double the quantity of the previous year — without any appreciable improvement in farm yields. That, according to the Economic Survey, cost us $542m or another 6.3 million children their education this year.

In aggregate, this equals the education cost of over a third of all children presently enrolled in our schools. Can we afford to be so immoderate in our mistakes, and so reckless with the future of our children? Shouldn’t anyone be invited to take the blame?

During the fiscal year 2007-08, our country had three finance ministers — Mr Shaukat Aziz for five months until November 2007, Dr Salman Shah for four months until March, and Mr Ishaq Dar for six weeks until May. Even the present incumbent, Syed Naveed Qamar holds the finance ministry as an additional charge. That might explain why our federal budget 2008-09 seems like a dish prepared without a recipe, using leftovers.

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The working day has barely begun in the special wing of Onomichi prison, but the dozens of inmates hunched over rows of desks on a rain-sodden weekday morning are already starting to wilt.

Their jobs hardly constitute hard labour: constructing corrugated casings for lightbulbs, tying lengths of wire to luggage tags and making pairs of knitted slippers. The silence is broken only when another guard, peaked cap pulled tightly over his eyes, enters the room, salutes and barks a military-style greeting to a colleague.

For these prisoners, the show of authority seems as out of place as the forbidding walls that block the view of the foggy coastline a few miles away. Few, if any, have the energy to start a riot, let alone attempt to escape.

There may be no hardened yakuza gangsters here, but Onomichi’s 70 or so ageing inmates nonetheless represent the biggest challenge facing Japan’s criminal justice system in decades.

The over 60s are the fastest-growing group of criminals in Japan, which incarcerates its pensioners at a rate far higher than any other country in the industrialised world. The number of Japanese aged 70 and over charged with crimes trebled between 2000 and 2006, from 9,478 to 28,892, according to the national police agency.

Last year elderly men and women were responsible for almost one in seven recorded crimes, compared with one in 25 a decade earlier. While most were guilty of theft, shoplifting and other petty offences, more than 150 were charged with murder.

For the first time, ageing criminals account for more than 12 per cent of the total prison population, prompting the government to earmark 8.3bn yen this year to build three new prison wards that will house more than 1,000 elderly inmates.

In the years to come, many of Japan’s 74 prisons will end up looking like Onomichi, an ageing prison about 400 miles south-west of Tokyo that first started catering to older prisoners 20 years ago. The prison, tucked away on a hill overlooking the Seto inland sea, incarcerates just over 300 offenders, 76 of whom are 65 or over. The average age of the men in the special ward is almost 70; the oldest is 89.

Almost all are serving sentences of one to several years for theft — usually of food from supermarkets — small-time fraud and, in a few cases, possession of drugs. The most serious offender, a man in his 70s, is serving a 10-year sentence for murder.

Almost all of Onomichi’s elderly inmates have their own cell, a 3.6-metre room with tatami-mat floor, a TV, a desk, a sink and a toilet. Their personal effects, mainly books and comics, are stored in locked suitcases whenever they are not in their cells.

The most common condition afflicting these men is loneliness. Some serve their sentences without seeing a single visitor. Their relatives are either dead or have ceased all contact. “When one of those inmates dies, the prison discreetly arranges a cremation and sends the ashes to his closest relatives,” Tomohiko Ogawa, the chief warden at Onomichi, says.

The rise of the superannuated criminal is only partly explained by Japan’s rapidly ageing population. While the number of Japanese aged 60 and over grew by 17 per cent between 2000 and 2006, the number of prisoners in the same age bracket soared by 87 per cent. Criminologists blame record levels of poverty among pensioners, the breakdown of the extended family, and a lack of professional help for those with depression and other mental illnesses.

According to a recent justice ministry study, almost two-thirds of Onomichi’s older inmates will walk back through its doors within five years of their release. “I’m comfortable with prison life,” a 76-year-old inmate told a Japanese newspaper earlier this year, before the prison banned prisoners from talking to visiting journalists. “I have clothing, food and housing and I’m taken care of when I get sick. Prison life is like a strict nursing home.”

Ogawa admits that Onomichi’s 76 prison staff face a daily struggle to reconcile society’s demands for retribution with their duty of care to inmates. The prisoners repay their debt by performing six hours a day of light manual labour, two less than Onomichi’s younger prisoners. Every few minutes, one of the men lays down his tools and shuffles to a makeshift pharmacy set up in the corner of the room, where the prison doctor dispenses pills that must be washed down on the spot with tiny cups of water.

As many as 80 per cent of the inmates have high blood pressure or diabetes. There is a portable mattress on hand in case anyone feels faint, along with a wheelchair and, placed discreetly behind a desk, boxes of incontinence pads.

Later, in the gymnasium, the noise level rises as the prisoners play table tennis, chat over games of chess or belt out classic karaoke tunes. Others sit and stare, read sports tabloids or flick through a meagre selection of religious and self-help texts.—The Guardian, London