Peanuts

South Asia as a whole, is in the front line of countries expected to face famine conditions.

Compared to what is to come, today’s cost of living in Pakistan is absolutely peanuts and yet we don’t pay enough serious attention to climate change. Ignoring ground realities is not going to make weather patterns revert to normal. As food prices surge inevitably alongside crop failures and general agricultural decline, the oft repeated mantra ‘It’s the government’s fault’ will hold as little water as the clouds across the country do right now.

South Asia as a whole, along with sub-Saharan Africa, is in the front line of countries expected to face famine conditions as global temperatures rise and seasonal rainfall becomes increasingly sporadic. This information has been released by an international research group called Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security. To dismiss this as being of no immediate concern is utterly ridiculous and serves to underline the pure, unadulterated selfishness of today’s coexistent generations who are living, working and hectically consuming only for the ‘now’.

No doubt the country will be reeling from the impact of the budget, but the fact that the average cost of key crops will increase by up to 180 per cent over the next few years is really something to be concerned about. This Oxfam released figure is based 50 per cent on climate change realities and 50 per cent on other factors, As these ‘other factors’ are unpredictable, the actual increase is liable to be of nightmarish proportions indeed.

Agricultural growth rate yields have been cut in half since 1990: Food costs have doubled since then and, according to the World Bank, global food prices have risen by a staggering 36 per cent over the past 12 months. This astronomical rise, fuelled partially by revolutions across North Africa and ongoing problems in the Middle East, plus declining agricultural productions, is linked directly to global warming.

An estimated one in seven of the world’s population currently goes hungry on a daily basis. This despite there being enough food in the world right now to feed everyone if, the big ‘if’, it was equitably distributed which, let’s face it, is never going to happen as the rich, despite their relatively small number, have always consumed far more than the poor, and food producing organisations play the game for profit and expect to win.

The push to modernise agricultural practices in Pakistan is, in the face of established let alone developing global warming, a move in the wrong direction: Western agricultural models are not applicable in either South Asian or African countries where soil and climatic conditions call for a different type of handling altogether. One would expect government bodies such as the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council and the Arid Zone Research Centre to have come up with locally feasible solutions to indigenous agricultural problems by now. But, judging from currently available information, they have failed miserably and are promoting expensive western technologies which are bound to fail over time.

Farmers continue to be at the mercy of greedy middlemen and existing consumer demands for specific crops, yet it is right here, at consumer level, that the fight against climate change catastrophes must begin. Consumers need to make the switch from water hungry, unsustainable crops, rice being a prime example and tomatoes another, over to drought tolerant species, thus literally forcing farmers to change their cropping patterns rather than switching over to disastrous, western innovations.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 14^th, 2011.