Poverty in Pakistan by By M. Zaidi

IN Pakistan’s scenario, where approximately two-thirds of the people live in rural areas, rural poverty is a major destabilising factor. Authoritative studies have documented rising poverty levels with a decreased capacity to acquire and hold land which is the main source of subsistence in the agricultural areas.

Nearly 67 per cent of Pakistan’s households are landless (though this cannot in itself be taken to be the sole denominator of poverty in the country). The problem is thrown into sharp relief when compared to the decline in India’s rural poverty levels between 1987 and 2000.

The comparison is pertinent since both countries inherited a nearly identical system of land holdings and feudalism. India seems to have tackled the issues better than Pakistan which appears to have alternated between monetary policies dictated by the IMF and the World Bank and its own experiments with land reforms which proved unsuccessful. The income disparity between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in Pakistan has also increased significantly while income disparity largely became an urban phenomenon during the period under review.

Since the reasons behind the rise of radicalisation are multifarious, an analysis utilising any single variable would be empirical, not to mention misleading. Nevertheless, whenever socioeconomic factors spring up in debates, the relationship between rural poverty and radicalisation figures quite prominently. Rural poverty was going down in Pakistan in the 1970s and 1980s but started increasing steadily during the 1990s. Although the methodologies and assumptions interpolated into the projection by a publicly funded Pakistani body are open to discussion, the poverty increase trend in the 1990s is alarming.

The official notification points out that nearly 67 per cent of households owned no land at the time this study came out; 18.25 per cent households owned less than five acres of land; and 9.66 per cent owned between five and 12.5 acres, sufficient only to provide meagre levels of existence for sometimes large extended families that tend to rely on land as the sole source of income. The pattern is dismally skewed towards a few feudal families in possession of large land holdings; barely one per cent (0.64 per cent plus 0.37 per cent) of households owned over 35 acres.

Thus, the problem in Pakistan is not just low levels of land holdings but also highly unequal land distribution leading to a class of ‘land haves and have-nots’.

Strikingly, poverty levels tend to decrease in inverse proportion to land-holdings, with poverty virtually disappearing with holdings of 55 acres and above. This indicates that poverty and landlessness are directly related to each other in Pakistan’s rural areas.

In terms of the spatial distribution of landlessness, 86 per cent of the households in Sindh were landless (landless plus non-agricultural), followed by 78 per cent in Balochistan and 74 per cent in Punjab. The evidence of the income disparity rampant in Pakistani society is bolstered by statistics, with the Lorenz curve of 2001-02 for Pakistan lying below the 1984-85 levels. In economics, the Lorenz curve is often used to represent income distribution and can also be used to show the distribution of assets.

This indicates that income distribution patterns have gradually worsened, resulting in higher income inequality in 2001-02 relative to 1984-85. Greater changes are visible in the higher part of the income distribution curves than in the middle and lower parts of the income brackets. This stipulates that during 2001-02, the upper income brackets registered a gain in income share to the richest 20 per cent at the expense of the poorest 20 per cent and middle 60 per cent.

This increased poverty levels in the lower and middle brackets. This projection also indicates that the richest one per cent who used to get 10 per cent of the total income in 1984-85 was, in 2001-02, getting almost 20 per cent.

It is estimated that in 1998-99, 30.6 per cent of Pakistanis were living below the poverty line. The estimate stands at 23.9 per cent in the period 2004-5, and according to official projections, dropped to 22.3 per cent by 2005-6. Rural poverty was estimated at 27 per cent in 2005-06, unfavourably comparing with an urban incidence of 13.1 per cent.

The official surveys have, however, been criticised on the grounds of faulty methodologies and the padding of results. A World Bank survey put the figures of poverty incidence in Pakistan at 28.3 per cent in 2004-05, with income distribution patterns utilising the Gini coefficient yielding a figure of 0.3 in 2005-06 as compared to 0.27 in 2001-02. This indicates that there is a skewed income distribution pattern in favour of the high earners, which negates the gains made in the eradication of absolute poverty by increasing income inequality. The overall poverty incidence was highest in Balochistan, with almost half the population living below the poverty line, with minimal difference between the poverty incidence in Sindh and Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa. However, once the Sindh data was adjusted for the skewed data patterns for rural poverty obtained by the inclusion of Karachi by comparing rural Sindh with rural Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Sindh figures rose to 38 per cent of the rural population living under the poverty line as compared to 27 per cent in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Punjab fared the best, with an overall poverty incidence of 26 per cent and, anomalously, a rural poverty incidence of just 24 per cent. This also implies that rural poverty was lower than average in both Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab, which seems to militate against conventional wisdom and other studies.

However, the problem is compounded once other variables such as lack of education, cultural and social paradigms are factored in, areas that need greater research in order to present a more meaningful picture of poverty in Pakistan.

The writer is a security analyst.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/17/poverty-in-pakistan.html

Dawn Analysis: The selfish state by Cyril Almeida

CRISES erupt, the government fire-fights, things settle back down: we’ve seen it a million times before, right?
At least that’s what logic traced on the historical record suggests. It’s always been the same, always will be the same. The unofficial motto of Pakistan is, onwards to the next crisis.
And yet, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that maybe, just maybe, something different is afoot.
The possibility of an Arab Spring breaking out in Pakistan has been pooh-poohed: Pakistanis are reasonably adept at knocking out of power dictators and civilians alike.
If you want Zardari out, a crowd of 10,000 converging on Constitution Avenue will have him scrambling to catch the next flight to Dubai. If you want Kayani gone, it would be more complicated and messier, but not as titanic as toppling a Mubarak or Qadhafi.
The possibility of an electoral revolution has been downplayed: the latest would-be saviour, Imran Khan, looks set to grab some seats, but lacks the candidates and party apparatus to make sweeping gains. The status-quo political powers will prevail come election time, or at least so says conventional wisdom.
The possibility of an Islamist takeover has been dismissed: the state is still too strong, the army too numerous for it to crumble against a militant force that all told may be a few tens of thousands strong.
The possibility of an Iran-style clergy-led revolution appears to be remote: among the ideologues in the religious parties and the militant corps none has the broad-based charismatic appeal that can carry them to national power.
But what do we really know about the preferences of the Pakistani people?
Conventional wisdom has it that the people want democracy to continue, they don’t want the army back. But the last time that theory was tested, a mere 35 million people turned out to vote in 2008. What did the other 130 million want?
Remove kids aged 14 and below from the scope of political action, and you’re still left with 80-odd million people whose opinion we know little about. Are they just indifferent to democracy, at least Pakistan’s version of it, or are they a combustible
mixture waiting for the right catalyst to be poured on?
The PPP and the PML-N are Pakistan’s two most popular political parties. Power will always belong to one of them, so says conventional wisdom again.
Turn once more to the 2008 elections and you’ll see that the PPP got ten and a half million votes, the PML-N nearly eight million. That’s a whole bunch more than zero — which our latest populist got after opting out of the election — and the handful
that the mullah brigade picked up.
Still, the notion that Pakistani politics is about constituency, constituency, constituency is undercut by the results of the last two elections. In ’08, the electorate singled out Musharraf’s men for punishment; in ’02, the American arrival in Afghanistan
powered the MMA to wins in Balochistan and then-NWFP.
With the right message, and the right timing, a few millions votes could be bagged, enough to bestow the sparkling newcomer with kingmaker status in the next parliament.
And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a politician as we know them. A right-wing ideologue could ride the wave of crazed religiosity that a Mumtaz Qadri-type act can unleash. Or maybe the next Lal Masjid-style firebrand will decide that the
possibility of a temporal kingdom is more tempting than certain rewards in the hereafter.
The surge doesn’t even have to come through the ballot box. Thus far the Baitullahs and Hakeemullahs and Faqir Mohammads have, much to the luck of the rest of us, thought small not big.
They have just wanted their little fiefdoms, their small platoons of suicide bombers, a bite here, a morsel there. And they haven’t exactly been the sharpest pencils in the militant box. Fear the day one of those kookie guys marries grand ambition to
ruthless political skill.
And why must it come from the civilian corner?
The army rank and file is disciplined and won’t en masse act on any crazy ideas, says conventional wisdom. But what about the top? It’s pretty well established that some pretty nutty men have made their way into the inner circle in the past.As for the
rank and filers tucked away in their orderly cantonments, who’s to say what they’re really thinking about and talking over among themselves. Rural and urban Pakistan have not stood still over the last 30 years, so why must the products of those
societies be what they have always been, docile and disciplined?
Whether any of these possibilities — or other possibilities that haven’t really been thought about — will ever come to pass is impossible to predict.
Easier is to identify the core reason for the unease spreading about the future of this country: the state has become its own raison d’être. The Pakistani state no longer exists to try and improve the lives of the people who live within it; it exists to feed
and perpetuate itself.
Really, what policy of the army hews to the public’s demand, recorded in poll after poll, election after election, for better delivery of basic services, for jobs, for economic well-being? Security or prosperity is a false choice, manifold times so when
the policy of putting security first has made Pakistan one of the least secure countries in the world.
And what’s the point of a transition to democracy when the choices made by a civilian set-up simply nudge the country a little closer to the edge of a cliff?
When a state exists to tend to its own needs to the almost-total exclusion of the public’s dreams and aspirations, it will eventually become a nightmare for everyone involved.
The only thing we don’t know yet: what kind of nightmare exactly.


Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/14/the-selfish-state.html

Ties with Pakistan vital to security, says US

WASHINGTON: Ties with Pakistan remained vital to US national security, the White House said on Friday as the State Department pledged to continue to work with Islamabad to defeat terrorism.

“The cooperation we have with Pakistan is extremely important in terms of our national security objectives, in terms of protecting Americans, in terms of taking the fight to Al Qaeda,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told a briefing in Washington.

“And that’s why we continue to work with the Pakistanis and try to build on that cooperation,” he added.

At the State Department, spokesperson Victoria Nuland underlined “an intense relationship on a number of issues, including on the counterterrorism docket.”

She also noted that US secretaries of state and defence and the CIA’s chief had all maintained contacts with their Pakistani counterparts while a special envoy was due in Islamabad for talks on all major issues.

“We are going to continue working on this issue of counterterrorism together because it is in both of our interests,” Ms Nuland said.
The statements followed recent media reports that increased cooperation between US and Pakistani intelligence agencies had
helped defuse the existing tensions between the two countries.

The ISI – although much-maligned in the US media – has been credited in these reports with arranging a meeting between US
officials and the Haqqani network.

ISI-CIA TIES: On Friday, the Director of US National Intelligence, James Clapper, told the Associated Press news agency that the ISI had quietly stepped up cooperation with the CIA, arresting some Al Qaeda suspects at their request and allowing US interrogators access to the detainees.

Pakistan has also stopped demanding the CIA suspend the covert drone strikes that have damaged Al Qaeda in Fata, another report said.

This cooperation “could mark a turning point in US-Pakistani relations,” observed Fox News while reporting the development.

“They are doing things to cooperate and be helpful,” said Mr Clapper. Other US officials told Fox News that both countries have made some progress in restoring the joint intelligence cooperation that used to be routine prior to the covert US raid that killed Osama bin Laden.After the raid Pakistan stopped joint operations with American intelligence officers, refused access to militant detainees and delayed visas for some US officials.

At the State Department, spokesperson Nuland, however, hinted that Pakistan had also allowed US officials to question bin Laden’s wives.

“We are working well with the Pakistanis on the aftermath of the bin Laden events,” she said but refused to “get into any specifics” of this cooperation. The US also appears to have softened its stance on Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani physician, who helped Americans trace bin Laden and is now in custody in Pakistan.

Washington wants him in the United States with his family. Pakistan not only turned down the request but a parliamentary committee indicated this week that he could be charged with treason.

The White House press secretary refused to condemn Pakistan when asked to comment on the committee’s decision.

“I’d refer you to the Pakistani government,” he said.

State Department’s Ms Nuland also refused to discuss this issue at a briefing where reporters asked half a dozen questions on the decision to try Dr. Afridi on treason charges.

“I’m not, from this podium, going to get into this set of issues at all,” she said. Instead, the White House and the State Department offered a general description of their ties to Pakistan.

“We have an important relationship with Pakistan. We have had enormous successes through our cooperation with Pakistan,” Mr Carney said. “We have also made clear that we have issues with Pakistan at times, and that it is a complicated relationship.”

Ms Nuland completely rejected the assertion that the US was running a campaign against Pakistan.

“We are trying to make the case to the Pakistani people as well as to Pakistani leaders that only working together are we going to defeat this threat (of terrorism) to both of us.”The US, she said, was also trying to publicise the civilian assistance it was giving to strengthen the Pakistani democracy, education system and the economy.

“That is also one of the best deterrents to extremism, when quality of life is being raised for everyone,” she said. When an Indian journalist suggested that most Pakistani hated the US, Ms Nuland urged him to help improve the US image.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/09/ties-with-pakistan-vital-to-security-says-us.html