The cost of rising prices

PRICE is the end product of all economic activities. It is therefore a complex issue to be tackled. The current upsurge in prices can be attributed to failures of the market as well as of official policies. The worst hit is the 74 per cent of the population which lives below two dollars a day or less than the officially fixed minimum wage of Rs 4,000 per month. In view of the rising cost of living, the industrial workers find that they are unable to make both ends meet. Countrywide people are living under the worst kind of poverty. The purchasing power of the poor is being eroded by food price inflation, now at an abnormally high rate of 10.2 per cent. A report carried in this newspaper on Friday says that the speculators and hoarders, active as usual on the eve of the budget, have raised the prices of many kitchen items. The price of wheat, a staple diet of the poor, also shot up because the government chose to allow exports without first building strategic stocks required to keep market volatility under check. Nor was there much wisdom in allowing exports in the early stages of crop harvesting when the initial and final crop estimates always vary because of the inability of food departments to accurately assess the crop size. On Thursday, the government had to suspend exports to prevent speculators from exploiting the market but flour mills representatives claim that the raised prices of atta would not come down.

A day later, export of gram was also suspended but that of rice continues with its price soaring

With the overseas sales of manufactured goods falling, the government appears to be focusing on the export of food grains at the cost of the poor consumers. The inconstancy in policies — allowing and then suspending exports — is not in the best interest of the market. The government’s intervention in the event of market failure should not create market distortions. What the government needs to do is to actively help people with excess money to find productive avenues rather than create artificial shortages for profiteering especially when the country has production and trade surpluses as in the case of wheat and gram. One gets the impression that whether it is the government, the market or the State Bank, the commitment to price stability is weak. All business ethics are set aside by the renter class to make a quick buck.

Apart from the fiscal expansion that contributes to high inflation, the government is dragging its feet on updating the competition law to curb unfair trade practices. The State Bank has yet to start inflation targeting while keeping the food prices outside the ambit of its monetary policy. While the major economic agents have easy access to corridors of power, the poor have no voice in policy-making that can only be ensured by periodical elections and democratic accountability. The principal issue in combating high inflation and poverty is the quality of economic growth. Despite robust growth averaging seven per cent for the past four years, unemployment is on the rise again. In the absence of a growth strategy anchored in equity, price stability will remain elusive and economic progress would have no meaning for the vast majority. Only a few will continue to benefit at the expense of many; a perilous course indeed.

What is ‘positive’ journalism?

HOLDING the print and electronic media responsible for projecting Pakistan in a negative light, President Pervez Musharraf has criticised the press and TV for not reporting the “government’s achievements in the fields of economy, education, telecommunication and even human rights”. His objections sound strange, especially because in the same breath, the president was aglow over the freedom his government has given to the media. He is right when he demands that freedom should be accompanied with responsibility. But this means different things to different people. For the media, it is the height of irresponsibility if it fails to report events that are taking place all around. That is how it was in the days of yore when authoritarian rulers muzzled the press and the audio-visual media was government-controlled. A corollary of this control was the pressure the media faced to adopt what was then called “development journalism” — reporting the government’s ‘achievements’ in glowing terms. It is strange that President Musharraf should be claiming that he has granted freedom of expression to the people and should simultaneously be complaining of the media’s failure to “raise the morale of the people” by highlighting positive things.

The fact is that a responsible press or TV channel is expected to take an over-all view of what is happening in the country and inform and educate the people about the good and the bad accordingly. By and large, this is what is being done. If viewers and readers tend to react adversely to the goings on in the country, there are two reasons for it. First, it is human nature for people to express their emotions more visibly and vocally when they learn of shocking things such as a bomb blasts, rallies and violence, rather than the so-called “positive” developments that make one feel good but take time to sink into one’s mind. Secondly, to make an impact, the ‘good’ developments must affect the lives of a large number of people in an unmistakable manner to tilt the balance in favour of the positive, when the full picture is taken into account. Unfortunately, the country is going through difficult times and the media should not be expected to distort or suppress facts to paint a rosy picture of things.

Fighting Aids

PARTICIPANTS in a workshop on Aids held recently in Quetta have stressed the need for creating greater awareness about this incurable disease. Pakistan is lucky in that it has a low prevalence rate of HIV/Aids at the moment. The National Aids Control Programme has registered approximately 800 Aids cases so far. However, the fear is that the actual figure is much higher. For lack of awareness about the disease and poor access to proper clinics and hospitals, many HIV/Aids cases are not diagnosed. Besides, the social stigma attached to the disease (transmitted mainly through sexually aberrant behaviour, the sharing of contaminated needles among drug addicts and their use in hospitals) prevents many patients from reporting their illness. In fact, according to the UN, the number of cases of HIV/Aids in Pakistan could be as high as 85,000. This means that the government cannot afford to be complacent and must take effective steps to reduce the incidence of the disease and put to effective use the sizable aid provided by international donors for the control of Aids in the country.

In doing so, the government’s main focus must be on spreading information about Aids. Greater efforts are needed to disseminate information, especially to high-risk groups and school-going children, who must be made to understand that the only way to combat the disease is through prevention. Such an effort to provide information and to encourage a public debate on Aids can only be promoted through proper planning and coordination among various government departments and NGOs. The task, though daunting, would be much easier to do now than later when cultural conservatism, coupled with the government’s negligence, make the problem spiral out of control. Pakistan would then have to pay a heavy price in trying to control Aids.

New Zealand’s Maori culture

AUCKLAND takes its beauty for granted. A wondrous four-hue rainbow borrowed from a fairytale rose gently from a small flurry of white clouds to the left, vaulted high towards the forehead of the sky and dipped with ever increasing power into the horizon, its colours pouring into the pot of gold resting below eyesight.

If, as New Zealanders are fond of saying, this glorious island is the last stop of the bus, then the pot of gold is, as promised, at the end of a world flattened by globalisation. How many metaphors are mixed in that last sentence? Let someone with a flat mind count. Our car turns a corner to change the street. The clouds darken, only to be brilliantly lit by the fluorescent light of the tail of my rainbow.

I feel possessive because no one else seems interested: not children chatting on their way to school, not the cars hurrying off to work, not my fellow passengers in the car, who are discussing and journalism and civilization.

Our destination is the Hoani Waititi Marae, where the class of 2007 from the Auckland University of Technology media department has been brought to commune with the wisdom and spirit of the Maori people. My rainbow has preceded me, now dressed in the finery fit for an admirer from across the seven seas. It is perfect, adorned with a fourth purple layer, an imperial band that seals its majestic dominance of the firmament as it vaults with a motionless grace from precisely above the centre of the roof of the Marae to the edge of vision.

The Marae is an open hall with a sloping roof and the simplicity and quiet humanity of a mosque, the feeling reinforced by the need to remove one’s shoes. A mosque is not the home of God, for God lives everywhere; it is the house of a community that comes to mingle and kneel in prayer before it disperses to a 100 homes.

We cannot enter without the permission granted through a ritual prayer to nature, spirits, ancestors and the One who has given us the sensitivity to enjoy the wonders of life and the sense to survive its burdens. But once inside the space, you belong here forever.

There is never a need for a second welcome. Outside on the lawns perfumed by the environment a gentle rain floats like overweight mist, reminding me of school, Shakespeare and Portia describing the quality of mercy to a businessman with a balance sheet in one hand and the law books in the other.

The star of the morning is the leader of the newly-formed Maori Party, which has seven seats in parliament. His patter is a hit because, I suspect, he never repeats an audience. He only repeats the jokes. But he is funny.

The Maori, like any minority with a powerful past and an injured present, display the chips on their shoulder like a general showing off his epaulettes. But one of the great achievements of the present New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark, is the conviction with which she is making her nation an inclusive, ethnic-equal society. There is still ideology left, even if you have to go to the end of the world to find it.

A fact and a factor made me feel uncomfortable during my first hours in the country. The fact was the weather. A grey, monotonous drizzle made me nostalgic for Indian sunshine. I knew that New Zealand had been recreated as a modern nation by British settlers, but did they have to bring British weather with them? What is the point of travelling across 12 time zones only to resettle under Scottish rain?

The factor was a man in the hotel. If the weather was wet, the receptionist at Langham Hotel was cold. He brusquely informed me that I would have to wait three hours before I could get a room. That is absolutely the last thing my stomach wants to hear after a very long overnight flight. I tried weaselling. He stopped a decimal point short of being rude and ordered me off. I slunk off defeated. I would have accepted defeat but the very pleasant lady behind me in queue, a bureaucrat from Oslo, was given a room without any fuss at all.

Was this race or gender bias?

I am pleased to report that by the evening both the weather and my mood had cleared. The rest of the staff of this splendid hotel have been as pleasant and friendly as all New Zealanders. The rough edges of political manipulation have been left behind on Australian beaches.

Helen Clark has not been defeated for nearly eight years but has begun to seem vulnerable, at least if the opinion polls in New Zealand are more accurate than the opinion polls in India. When defeat comes, as it must in any democracy, I suspect that she will have changed the political culture so much that a politician like Australia’s neo-virulent John Howard could never get elected in her stead.

I write this in a Turkish kebab and Coke shop on Queen’s Street. The top of the street is dominated by Koreans and Japanese, the Northeasterners of Asia, as they are known here. Two young Korean men in blonde hair, knee-waist jeans and fancy-label plain white T-shirts calmly light up a weed that is not tobacco.

The streets drift towards Friday-afternoon crowds, the familiar cluster of brand-name shops and small stores and restaurants that confirm the charms of variety. The sun is out, warming the fluctuating temperature of an autumn breeze. The foyer of the hotel looks cheerful. I have not seen that frigid receptionist for two days. I hope they’ve sacked him, but I fear he may merely be on leave.

Maoris dance with their fingers, which flutter as rapidly as the wings of a small bird. Women sway to the music and song of lilt and emotion, plaintive or happy, as if time moved outside the pace of life. Men suddenly jump out of this serenity. Their voice becomes guttural, and they thump their fleshy breasts as the rhythm switches into battle mode. A leader pumps men and music into battle mode.

But anger is exhausting. Almost imperceptibly, the women return to the forefront, and one is drawn, reassured, to that mesmerising peace of the fluttering hands below the hip. We are in Auckland for a conference on an Alliance of Civilisations, one of the worthy causes that the United Nations periodically takes up to keep the righteous engaged.

Be that as it may, surely a prerequisite for such a gathering is that the host must be civilised. Both New Zealand and her prime minister score top marks. They are neither coy nor cloying; the friendliness is just right. Helen Clark also understands that alliance, like charity, begins at home. She starts her speeches in fluent Maori.

Dr Allan Bell of the Auckland University of Technology, a reincarnation of Professor Henry Higgins, has been recording New Zealand’s dialects for three decades. He has published evidence that his country may remain loyal to the Queen of England but is finally becoming independent of the Queen’s English.

Radio and television broadcasters, who do so much to shape accents, once used to follow the BBC template. That was the definition of respectable standards. Now, New Zealand rules. Maori words like ‘iwi’, ‘mana’ and ‘whanau’ have attained currency and it’s no longer ‘fish and chips’ but ‘fush and chups’. ‘Bed’ is out and ‘bid’ is in. English was global long before globalisation. It flourishes because it is being nationalised everywhere. There are no discontents in its content.

The writer is editor-in-chief of The Asian Age, New Delhi.

Unwelcome guests

ONCE again Palestinian blood is being shed, as shells are dropping in overcrowded refugee camps. This time, however, the guns are not Israeli, but those of the Lebanese army. More astonishingly, this military action has the qualified approval of the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, who have allowed Lebanese soldiers to take up positions 500 metres inside Nahr al-Bared camp, where the fighting has been raging since Sunday. For 38 years 400,000 Palestinians have had the status of being "guests" of the country, and an agreement with the PLO stops the Lebanese army entering the camps.

But since last November the Palestinian camps have been getting some unwelcome guests of their own. Quite who Fatah al-Islam are, or where they came from, is a matter of dispute. The US-backed government of Lebanon claimed they were tools of Syrian intelligence, but there is little concrete evidence that they are: Syria's foreign minister, Walid Muallem, has publicly condemned the organisation, arguing that it does not serve the Palestinian cause.

Palestinians fleeing the fighting in the camp report that the militant group is composed of Syrians, Jordanians, Saudis and Iraqis. The armed jihadis – Sunnis by religion – appeared in the camps a year ago on motorbikes and scooters, and have been there ever since. Their aim was not to fight their holy war against the Lebanese, but to use the camps as a logistics base. They count Lebanese among their supporters, as there are Salafi Sunnis in the poor communities in the north of the country.

The present fighting was triggered by an army raid on houses of suspects involved in a bank raid in Tripoli. The militants burst out and overwhelmed army positions. At least 25 soldiers were killed and 40 injured in the fighting, Lebanon's worst internal violence since its protracted civil war ended in 1990

––The Guardian, London