Riding a starving tiger
The Economist | 15th May 1971
The army can avert what looks like being a famine in East Pakistan if it can be persuaded to use its transport to shift grain rather than troops. Otherwise Bengal could all too easily starve.
Pakistan is very close to a national disaster for which, if it happens, the western countries will be held partly responsible. The situation amounts to this; millions of people may die in the next few months in East Pakistan unless the army turns its attention from policing the region to shifting food; there is not enough transport to do both. Secondly Pakistan’s economy, west and east, will soon come to a stop through lack of foreign unless it gets a big dollop of aid from Europe, the United States and Japan. The government in Islamabad can defy the rest of the world on the first issue only if concerted diplomatic pressure is not applied through the second. There are encouraging signs that it is beginning to be applied. But the danger is that unless the world as whole becomes engaged the minimum, as usual, will be done.
Until now, despite the horror stories that have come out of the east wing with refugees and expatriates, the real implications of Pakistan’s internecine struggle have not sunk in. since the federal government decided at the end of March to deal with the east wing’s independent movement by force, a disaster much greater than that caused by last November’s typhoon has always been likely. But in the confusion of fighting, communal rioting and the flood of refugees across the Indian border, there has been a striking absence of hard facts on which the outside world could make judgments.
In a largely agricultural area, based on thousands of villages barely accessible at the best of times, figures mean very little. But the foreign correspondent allowed into East Pakistan have brought back a picture of death and devastation in the main towns (some of it caused, so it appears, by communal rioting between Bengalis and Biharis) that far outweighs the damage caused by the typhoon, when at least , people died. And possibly 3 million refugees may have crossed into west Bengal, causing enormous problems in supplying the basic necessities of life, as well as intensifying still further the distrust between India and Pakistan.
In the short term, India has the food reserves available to cope with the influx, but has now told the United States that it will need 140*** million a year to meet the cost of doing so. But the immediate crisis is in East Pakistan itself. There is the prospect of widespread famine in the second half of this year which must be taken very seriously, despite reassuring statements from Islamabad.
Most non-pakistanis believe a co-ordinated external relief effort will be needed, and immediately. The means of pressure is through the World Bank consortium of aid donors on which Pakistan now depends for its economic future. But the picture is complicated by the difficulty of giving aid to an economy already so close to crisis point. The problems is that the aid donors, of which the big four are the United States, Japan, West Germany and Britain, regard a durable political settlement as essential if they are to pour aid into reconstruction projects either in the west or the east. This is because the economics of the two wings are so interrelated, with the west depending on the east’s export surplus. But equally it is hard to see how such a long term political settlement is going to be forthcoming.
The only short-term answer, therefore, is to deal with the crisis as it develops. The aid club has already held a meeting in Paris, and a senior World Bank official has been in West Pakistan to try to discover just what the state of the economy is. Pakistan has asked for a six-month moratorium on its foreign debts starting from May 1st, which with annual debt service payments amounting to over $150 million (or at least 20 percent of exports), would substantially relieve the immediate foreign exchange service. Although this probably will be granted, as it has been to other countries in the past, no one is putting new aid in the pipeline. And coping with famine is seen as the immediate priority.
East Pakistan normally needs to import some 10 percent of its grain requirements, or around 1.7 million tones. But because of the typhoon, which devastated one of the main surplus areas in the south around Patuakhali and Barisal, a further 1.5 million tons was needed this year. Relief shipments were coming in steadily, mainly to Chittagong, until the beginning of March, when the ports came to a standstill during the brief period of control by the Bangla Desh secessionists. Since then little or nothing has been unloaded and several grain ships, after waiting for a month or more, have sailed away. And there has been very little movement of grain from the ports to the interior. Until now this hiatus has not had a serious effect, partly because of grain moved earlier, and partly because the main local crop harvest in November and December ensures enough food for the first half of the year. The big crisis will come from next month onward.
There are mainly two main problem zones, the cities and the rural deficit areas, in particular those struck by the typhoon. The original plan was to have a three-month stock of food in secure storage available for the delta area by June in time for the monsoon, which makes transport extremely difficult. It seems very unlikely that this will be anything like achieved. The big towns can be more quickly and easily dealt with, provided the grain can be transported from the ports. So far it appears that the main means of transport have either not been working properly or have been commandeered by the army for military movements. Even if the ports are on the point of being reopened—and there is little sign of this yet—there would still be a very serious problem.
There are further big question marks. Many people have been moving from the towns back to the country-side. If they stay there they may cause a larger and more intractable problem of rural starvation even if the towns are thereby easier to feed. Many of the refugees are rice farmers from the north-west who will have no crops to go back to if they return (indeed, no one knows how much planting went on in March for the main crop at the end of the year). What must be hoped for is that in the jute areas of the north-east the farmers will have planted rice instead this year, as they were asked to by Sheikh Mujibor Rahaman. This will be harvested during in August and September.
It is impossible to quantify the food picture. But it looks very serious. A lot turns on the army’s ability to get the ports working quickly and to supply enough transport to get the extra food distributed. But if it does that it must be prepared to cut back on its military operations—and possibly lose control over large areas. For the federal government, therefore, the famine questions may represent an equation which is impossible to solve. But transport is also badly needed to get exports moving again, as they have not been since the beginning of the March. Jute, raw manufactured, accounts for nearly half Pakistan’s exports and it all comes from the east, which also supplies quite a lot of import substitutes for the west in form of tea, fruit and vegetables. Although much of the raw jute crop was either exported or sold forward earlier in the year, there is still some which has not even reached the ports, while the jute mills, like most of the east’s manufacturing capacity, are believed to have been at a standstill for the past 2.5 months.
Before March, Pakistan was already in severe balance-of-payments trouble, which short-term debt far outweighing foreign exchange reserves. It will have to start cutting back on imports, many of them essential for industry in the west. Over a third of its foreign exchange, or around $400 million, is obtained through aid, over half of it for specific projects. With the economy in its present muddle little new aid will be forthcoming until donors can see how it can be usefully employed. For example, there is no point on planning a project, even in the west, when many of the essential inputs are missing, such as raw materials, goods from other factories and so on. Aid has to be slotted into an over-all reconstruction programme and the essence of this is a stable political environment. As yet this is not even on the horizon.
Unicoded by
Tushar Mondal