Daily Times

The Malthusian prognostications made around the time of the industrial revolution about impending food crises that would take place because of a population explosion were initially staved off because of a technological revolution, wherein mechanised farming came to mankind’s rescue. However, we might not be so lucky in our neck of the woods because of our technological backwardness and governance deficit.

The post Westphalian world where technology ushered in an industrial revolution created two distinct worlds. There was the world of industrialised countries, that propelled by its economic surplus, looked outwards to find raw materials and consumer pockets to slake the ever increasing thirst of their industrial and trade entrepreneurs. Another world was of the societies that had missed the industrial revolution and therefore lay prostrate before the industrial might of the heavily armed industrialised empires out to seek their respective lebensraums. That they slaughtered each other in this quest is another gory chapter in mankind’s history, but none of the internal feuds of industrialised empires dissuaded them from draining the resource rich agrarian economies of the third world.

The history of colonisation and the post-colonial order clearly point towards the perils of empire building. The rich and industrialised world appropriated the economic surplus from the colonised world, and riding on the crest of a technological revolution created an economic surplus of its own that fuelled phenomenal economic growth. They went through their periods of controlled democracy and centralised planning only to jettison these strictures in a post Keynesian world of liberal democratic order buttressed by market economy. While this was all accompanied by conflict and disorder, the end of World War-II ushered in a new world riven by binaries like East-West and North-South. The rich North subscribing to both liberal as well as totalitarian political model ala USSR moved quickly to stabilise the fruits of their sedulous conquest of the vanquished and poor South. The buzzword for neo-colonials was amelioration of the people from the uncivilised and penurious South, which still had a mass surplus of extractable raw material.

The tactics of the former colonisers had changed, but the strategy remained the same. Appropriation of the surplus from poor countries through structures of political and economic dependency. The instruments of economic colonisation in this digital age are the World Bank and IMF, alongwith a surfeit of munificent aid and debt facilitation agencies.

Instead of becoming an enabler, population becomes a retarder if we do not possess the ability to feed, educate, and cure our under nourished, uneducated and unskilled masses

The world now stands divided between the economic slaves and the masters. Technology is emerging as the lifeblood of economic progress. It is here that the perils to the technological slaves of the world emerge. Samuel Huntington has devoted a chapter on the political and economic progress of Pakistan in an environment of governance deficit in his book Political Order in Changing Societies. Politics, economy, and governance being intertwined in this information age remain our Achilles’ heel in our Sisyphean endeavour to catch up with rest of the developed world. Our political and business elite have to understand that the price of bad governance and abject capitulation to the shapers of a global exploiter-exploited dichotomy is perennial bondage and ultimately, politico-economic extinction.

Countries like China, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Turkey, and Singapore have broken out of their economic bondage to challenge the dominant economic powers of the world through the sweat of their brow. In all the above cases one single factor has emerged stronger than all other factors — sincere and competent leadership that was aware of national problems and strove hard to overcome them. Here in Pakistan, despite having a form and structure of a liberal democratic order the substance of real democracy is absent.

Rather, the chaos and instability generated by a jostle for politico-economic dividends has created a system of spoils and rent seeking that has pushed good governance to the backburner. There is a palpable absence of a sense of urgency to resolve problems that are proving to be existential threats to our national survival. Consider for instance our runaway population, which threatens to devour whatever we raise in the form of development. If nothing else happens and for some reason we are recompensed by providence in the shape of long-lasting peace, we would still have our Malthusian battles to fight. These include the population explosion, energy crises, floods, droughts, and famines.

Instead of becoming an enabler, population becomes a retarder if we do not possess the ability to feed, educate, and cure our under nourished, uneducated and unskilled masses. The planners must realise that Pakistan is faced with a mortal threat of being a water scarce country by the year 2025 according to a UN study. The climate change, environmental degradation, health and sanitation, and urban housing chaos are threatening to deprive us of clean air, safe drinking water, roads, railways, and public health. Entire communities whether rich or poor, gated or non-gated, planned or ghettoised are being threatened as public roads shrink and water disappears. Unplanned urban development without government oversight is threatening our arable land cover, which in the absence of dams and ever depleting sub-surface aquifers would be unable to take care of our food security in the future. It is this threat to the common basic needs that ought to shake our visionless decision making elite out of complacency.

What would our rich and powerful do without food, breathable air and liveable urban spaces? If we continue with our unplanned urban growth fetish, the time is not far when our urban elite’s gated mansions will become opulent jails. Our elite must realise that their islands of affluence cannot remain impervious to the implacable waves of crime, environmental degradation, food shortages, water scarcity, urban gridlocking, and perpetual strife on borders as well as inside. Only those national leaders who do not plan on living in this country or do not believe in the future viability of the country would plan and rule so nonchalantly. It is very disheartening to see the heads of institutions meant to dispense justice prying open the governance spaces to find horrifying spectacles of political bribery, corruption, nepotism, and downright incompetence.

Our Malthusian spectre calls for every ounce of our national leadership’s energy going into issues like population, water resource management, urban development, energy, industrial, and agricultural planning. What we have instead is a tiresome spectacle of 8 to 11 pm talk shows focused on sensational issues and political one-upmanship in expensively choreographed political rallies. This complacency cannot continue.

The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST. He can be reached at rwjanj@hotmail.com

Published in Daily Times, May 1^st 2018.