Pakistan: Now or Never?
Perspectives on Pakistan
Guest contribution:Reconstruction, the silver lining of Pakistan’s flood disaster
(The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone. The writer is Pakistan’s High Commissioner to the UK)
By Wajid Shamsul Hasan
Is the flood over in Pakistan? No. Most certainly not! Notwithstanding the massive relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction operations, the devastation from the worst natural disaster in recent times continues to claim lives in scores due to the outbreak of epidemics, lack of health facilities, and shortage of food, shelter and clothing.
How horrendous life has been after the deluge is unfortunately fading away from the focus of the media as Pakistan continues to cope with a natural calamity described by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as a slow tsunami, six times bigger than any other catastrophe in the last fifty years. The flood which swept through northern tip of Pakistan to Sindh affected a land mass the size of England and uprooted more than 20 million people.
Reconstruction work is on full swing – thanks to domestic and international agencies. As a resilient nation Pakistanis are doing their best to get back on their feet. No doubt there are gigantic challenges ahead but these floods have opened new opportunities to everyone whether within Pakistan or abroad.
Although an assessment is still being made of infrastructure losses, there are estimates that nearly 2,433 miles of roads and 3,508 miles of railway lines, 45 bridges, nearly 10,000 schools and 1.7 million houses have been destroyed and are now waiting to be rebuilt. That certainly offers enormous scope for investment as well as an opportunity to gain the goodwill of the people. Pakistan’s hour of adversity can also play a positive role in rebuilding its economy and help it to fight terrorism more effectively. The construction of 1.7 million houses alone offers a big business opportunity.
The Government of Pakistan’s Flood Relief And Early Recovery Plan 2010 launched in collaboration with the United Nations to extend the relief phase to achieve a sustainable, meaningful and productive recovery of the flood affected areas is a way forward. The National Disaster Management Authority has so far approved 397 projects in the fields of agriculture, community restoration, coordination and support, education and food security with an estimate of $1.9 billion. For the approval and execution of projects the government has put in place effective monitoring and evaluation mechanisms.
Pakistan’s farmland sales: a fatal folly?
Any student of history will tell you that a recurring feature of 20th century revolutions and civil wars was conflict over land ownership, driven by the resentment of the rural poor against the concentration of agricultural wealth in the hands of the elite. (Cuba and Vietnam, where Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh picked up support by championing farm reform, are good places to start.)
So Pakistan’s plans to sell farmland to rich Gulf investors deserve serious attention, even if land ownership does not have the same ability to grab headlines as its nuclear weapons.
Waqar Ahmed Khan, the Federal Minister of Investment, said last month Pakistan was offering one million acres of farmland for lease or sale to countries seeking to develop food supplies, and was holding talks with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and other Arab states. He said all land up for sale or lease was currently unused and promised to hire a security force of 100,000 men, funded by foreign aid, to protect their investments.
His comments prompted a column in U.S. website The National Interest, which argued that the farmland sales would serve as a recruitment tool for Islamist militants who have already picked up support by championing the cause of Pakistan’s rural poor against the feudal elite which dominates the country.
The devil, as usual, will be in the details, but the following obvious questions spring to mind.
What does it mean for Pakistan’s fractured society?
In an article in the Huffington Post, Eric Margolis became the latest to argue that the battle against Islamist militants in Pakistan’s north-west is in danger of morphing into a much wider conflict – ”a national revolution in Pakistan against the western-backed feudal oligarchy that has ruled it since 1947.” If correct, then any perception that the rich were benefitting from farmland sales at the expense of the poor would only stoke this anger further.
Pakistan should never sell or lease agricultural land to Saudis or any other foreign governments or corporations or individuals as it will be very detrimental for our own future needs of food as our population is growing at such a fast pace.
Food will be a more precious commodity than petrol & energy in future. So, we shall be able to export food to countries like Saudi Arab at higher prices in future. Let these Saudis & other countries pay more petro dollars to us through buying food from us, instead of giving them opportunity to grow their own food on our land. They have been squeezing quite a lot from us while selling petroleum to us at quite exorbitant rates, & making our labor work up there at such miserably low salaries. It will be their pay back time in future. So the government should not dare sell or lease such a precious land to anybody.
Only idiots won’t understand the real worth of farmland which it will hold in future & might like to sell by taking a few billion dollars. Even if they do sell there will be a time in future when we’ll grab it back from them.
Looking at the positive side of Pakistan’s economy
Amid the conventional wisdom that Pakistan’s economy is falling to pieces — a view reinforced inside the country by soaring food prices and frequent power cuts — it’s interesting to see that someone still sees it as a hot market for foreign funds.
The Melchior Selected Trust Pakistan Opportunities Fund, one of the first funds to target Pakistan, believes the country’s problems have been exaggerated and sees its market as having the potential of “India at half the price”, according to this Reuters story.
It quotes Naz Khan, chief executive officer of KASB Funds in Karachi, as saying there is no reason to be particularly concerned by the tensions along the border with Afghanistan. “We have locked horns with India many times along the border with them in the last few decades,” he says. “This is just a different border and it shouldn’t affect the overall economy.”
The story prompted me to hunt around to see what else is out there painting a positive picture of Pakistan’s economy.
For starters, there is an economic growth forecast of 5.5 percent for the fiscal year starting in July, according to preliminary details on the budget due out next week. That is a level that the recession-haunted west can barely remember, let alone dream about.
Then there are record oil prices swelling the coffers of Gulf Arab states for whom Pakistan is a near neighbour and obvious investment target. The Dubai-based CPI Financial online newsletter says that investors are taking a long-term view on Pakistan’s economic turmoil. Of particular interest is a boom in Islamic banking — a sector relatively insulated from the credit crunch and dominated in the Gulf by Pakistani bankers.
CPI Financial quotes Mansoor Khan, managing director of Lahore-based law firm Khan Associates, as saying that conventional banks would probably be more affected by Pakistan’s economic turmoil than their Islamic counterparts. “The conventional banks are western, risk-averse and do not understand ‘Pakistan risk.’ Islamic banks are primarily Middle Eastern or Asian and have a better understanding of the mentality of Pakistan. They will not be put off.”
wow @ all you illiterate people
go and learn the history of the taliban, (began with us funding and support) , then learn the history of kashmir, and then learn the history of pakistan and india
i am from neither of those countries, and neither would i want to be
Chatterjee, you are telling indians to get off, why are you still on
This was about the positive side of Pakistan’s economy, not who owns kashmir
get a life, and step in the 21st century, where the west doesnt care much about india or pakistan
