“The problems faced by Pakistan’s people are largely the same as they were 30 years ago while over the same period, people of South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and China have increased their income seven-fold”— Illango Patchamuthu, World Bank, Country Director.

If these views were not coming from the World Bank, few would have accepted them or taken them seriously. The unfortunate thing is not only that what is quoted above is true, but that the situation on the ground is even worse.

Since government spokesmen and their statisticians will dispute the question of whether over the last 30 years income levels and standard of living have increased in Pakistan or not, let us take two areas which are non-controversial but interconnected: food security and population growth.

Food security first. At the end of this year’s budget session, our new finance minister shocked the nation by saying that Pakistan has become a net importer of food. However, he assured us that now the government will pay full attention to agriculture.

He did not give details of food imports and their valuation, but daily Dawn (July 20, 2021) has informed us that Pakistan’s food import bill grew by 53.95 percent to US$ 8.347 billion year-on-year during the previous fiscal year (FY21). This was mainly due to import of sugar, wheat, and palm oil to bridge the import shortfalls in domestic production. The import bill for pulses, dried fruits, milk and other food products also grew significantly during the same period, the report added. Mind you we are talking about an agrarian economy where over 50 percent of the population is connected with agriculture.

Everyone knows that pre-partition Punjab was known as the ‘granary of India’. The eastern part now part of India (which is much smaller than Western Punjab) has doubled or tripled its production in the last few years. The question is why is our side lagging behind?

Have our farmers become lazy? Has our climate changed? Is there water shortage in Punjab? Have our inputs like seed, fertiliser, pesticides changed? If none of this is true, we have to find the answers elsewhere. Perhaps it was the abolition of the zamindari system in India followed by a long-term agricultural policy, emphasis on research and extension, substantial and continuing subsidies to farmers, better storage and marketing facilities, etc, which not only provided food security to India but also made the Punjabi farmers a prosperous lot in the country?

Land reforms was also a part of Muslim League’s manifesto on which it launched its election campaign in 1946. Pakistan was promised to be a land of social justice, free from hunger, poverty and disease. In 1947, unprecedented mass migration from both sides provided an opportunity to allocate pieces of land to the migrant farmers. But it was our misfortune that this opportunity was lost. A meek effort was, however, made by Mian Iftikharuddin, the then revenue minister to start the process of allocating land to the landless but the feudal lobby was so powerful that he had to resign.

Our second failure was the sustained lack of investment in the agriculture sector even in the absence of land reforms. Not only did we ignore direct investment and infrastructure development, but we also did not pay serious attention to research and extension.

We did establish universities and research centres but due to absence of accountability, these soon became employment bureaus and spent most of the funds on salaries, etc. Whatever innovation and progress we see in agriculture today, especially fruits and vegetables or floriculture in Pakistan is because of private entrepreneurs.

Our third mistake was that instead of indigenisation of our planning and development process, using our own resources, we fell in the trap of foreign advisors. In the late 1950s, under the advice of Harvard Advisory Group we tried to leapfrog to large-scale manufacturing, ignoring agriculture, medium and small size industries.

Pakistan is a vast country with different climate zones. There is ample fertile land. We have a hard working population. It is unfortunate that we have never used our resources properly. For example, we did not pay attention to cattle farming, dairy products, fisheries, and horticulture, nor could we become self-sufficient in the production of edible oils.

Holland is a small country but its income from flowers’ export alone is US$ 50 billion. Contrast this with our cotton crop. Until recently we were the fifth largest producer of cotton in the world. The current cotton production is just about half of what we were producing before. This decline is not due to natural causes but due to lack of research and development, but no one seems to be bothered.

Now let us talk about the demographic time bomb we are sitting on. In a country which has become a net importer of food, where almost half of the children can’t go to school, where unemployment is rising by the day, our first priority should have been family planning to avert an inevitable catastrophe.

Our current population growth rate is 2.1 percent per annum which is the highest in the region. If it continues unabated, there is nothing to prevent our population crossing the 340m mark in the next 30 years.

Is it not surprising that in spite of this alarming situation, there is no discussion on the high rate of population growth, both at the state or societal level, what to talk of launching a comprehensive and long-term plan of action.

It is generally believed that a family planning programme is not successful here because we are a conservative Muslim society, dominated by the clergy. But people should recall that in 1965, when our population growth had not become a big issue, full attention was paid to this problem and a comprehensive programme was launched by the government both in rural and urban areas.

1965-68 was a period of massive build-up and it was expected that if the programme continued it would show spectacular results. But it was not to be as in mid-1968 political upsurge swept away the programme. The experience, however, clearly showed that there was hardly any resistance from the users of contraceptives on religious grounds.

Since then the organisation of the programme has been subjected to quantitative and qualitative shifts and disruptions. Each of these left some mark on the programme organisation though none as great as the virtual abandonment of the whole programme in 1977. Since the mid-1960s our contraceptive use rate hardly reached 30 percent. It is however estimated that there is an unmet demand of 30 percent users which can’t be met because of our incompetence and flawed planning.

A range of contraceptives and implants, etc, continue to remain in short supply in government as well as private facilities. A recent article by Zafar Mirza, a former Special Assistant to Prime Minister (SAPM) on health confirmed that out of nine million pregnancies each year in Pakistan, four million are unwanted because of the above reason.

One can see that the problem of religious backlash is just an alibi. Real bottleneck in our case is the ambivalence that still persists in our ruling elite about family planning. On the one hand, its legitimacy is challenged by them, and on the other, there is demand for accountability for non-achievement of any spectacular results.

Our planners and policy makers also ignore the fact that investments in human resource development with inputs like female literacy, mother’s health and nutrition, and women’s employment in the organised sector also play a major role in population control as is evident in Bangladesh’s case. It has achieved a 72 percent female literacy rate and the surprising result is that the number of contraceptive users has grown from 10 percent in 1971 to 65 percent in a generation’s lifetime.

If we are looking for another successful model, let us look at Indonesia which is the largest Islamic country with an identical socio-political context. Decades earlier, Indonesia had managed to reduce its population growth rate to 1.4 percent per annum and their current contraceptive use rate is 80 percent. It succeeded because its ulema, its armed forces, its women organisations, wives of political leaders and community volunteers, all participated effectively at different levels of the programme.

The writer is a social scientist.