Drought is not the killer

The latest in a consistent pattern of natural disasters in Pakistan is a famine in Thar that has reportedly already taken the lives of hundreds, and at least 41 children. The actual death toll is likely to be much higher. Like clockwork, several things happen in the immediate aftermath of this kind of breaking news in our country.
First, we can always trust our leaders and officials, such as the relevant chief minister and the prime minister to ‘take notice’ of the situation. This is comforting. Second, a chorus of humanitarian needs and requirements begins to emerge, largely from the now well-established community of humanitarian workers across the country. Traditionally, these saviours comprised domestic civil society – both secular and religious – but over time the international community has become well represented by UN agencies and other international NGOs too. The most recent addition to this group is ‘the benevolent capitalist’.
In a few days, or perhaps weeks, when the pictures and images of the Thar Desert are overshadowed by another outrage (most likely a terrorist attack in an urban area), the people of Thar will once again be left to their devices. They will have to deal with their desert, its moods, their livestock and its needs, and their stirring encounter with the Pakistani free market all on their own.
One important dynamic to remember in all this is the powerful religious symbolism and language that we use to process natural disasters. We will be told that these disasters are a ‘curse of God’ – a punishment for our collective sins. And we should expect that often it will be the humanitarian hyper-nationalists and extremists from groups like the Jamaatud Dawa that will be at the site of the disaster more swiftly than any other humanitarian group.
The googly in all this is that, unlike the vast majority of this country’s victims of natural disasters or ‘curses of God’, the people of Thar are not overwhelmingly benign Barelvi Muslims, but a wide mix of religious orientations, including a sizeable number of Hindus. Desert. Rural. Poor. Agricultural. And not Muslim. You can imagine which end of the lucky-duckies scale the people of Thar occupy.
These various dynamics are not merely tools for analytical gratification. They represent the set of enabling and disabling contextual factors that will determine the following three important things in relation to the Thar famine. First, the assessment of the damage and its extent. Second, the ability of state, society and the international community to respond to the damage. And third, our ability to prevent and respond to such disasters in the future.
Before assessing, responding to and planning for disasters like the one that has hit Thar, we should also revisit where this disaster has taken place. Arif Hasan, one of the jewels of this country’s intellectual landscape, has written about the 1987 famine in Thar quite beautifully, and his writings can be found on his website. The blunt summary of his assessment at that time was that Thar experienced a major socioeconomic transformation between the 1960s and the 1980s that resulted in decidedly different pressures on the land and people of Thar. The 1971 war and India’s occupation of Thar was one of several major turning points.
For Hasan, either we would have to leave the Tharis to the vagaries of the free market, or we would need to design and execute new and innovative institutions and entitlements that would allow the Tharis to weather the storm of the dramatic changes to their economy, ecology and society in the two decade period prior to the 1987 famine. One need not be a genius to figure out that we chose to leave the Tharis to deal with the free market on their own. No long-term institutional investments in Thar’s ecology or people took place then (It also does not take a genius to predict that none will take place now).
There is more to the Thar context that deserves mention. The Tharparkar district was the home of that great gift of controlled democracy under General Musharraf known as Arbab Ghulam Rahim, Sindh’s chief minister from 2004 to 2007. Rahim is from Tharparkar, and his gift to the district was the fastest and most prolific tsunami of new school buildings in one district in the nation’s history.
Tharparkar today has 3,873 government primary schools. To compare, consider this: Lahore has 739, Karachi has 2,530, Multan has 1,300, Shaheed Benazirabad has 1,572 and Larkana has 1,223. Tharparkar, with a much lower population, has a much higher number of schools than both urban and rural districts across the country. In one village named Waori Goth alone, there are 400 households, but 54 schools. How? Why?
Simple. Building schools allows politicians to hire political workers as teachers and issue construction contracts to favourites. Arbab Ghulam Rahim of Tharparkar was not the Mother Teresa of Tharparkar. He contributed to the destruction of his own people. Children in Tharparkar cannot do math and cannot read. Enrolment rates are lower here than in some of the worst off districts in Balochistan. Thar is an unmitigated human disaster and tragedy even without a famine.
Finally if we are to truly respond to, help and plan for future emergencies like the Thar famine effectively, we need to revisit lessons from history and from economics. Amartya Sen introduced a way of thinking about famines through something called the ‘entitlement approach’ and used the examples of famines in places that had food surplus (and in some cases were exporting food), while the locals starved to death. He uses the Bengal famine of 1943, Ethiopian famine of 1973 and Bangladesh famine of 1974 to illustrate this approach.
Efficiency-hawks love to hate Sen, and no doubt many will cite the various limitations of Sen’s work on famines. But the core argument Sen has made about famine and public policy should resonate deeply in Pakistan. In a famine, people’s hunger is not necessarily a result of the shortage of food, but rather the result of people’s inability to access food.
There is no mystery or great drama. Famine is a public policy problem. We already know from the most recent National Nutrition Survey that Sindh is “the most food-deprived province of Pakistan. Only 28 percent of households were food secure.” We already know that Sindh has been ravaged by ecological, demographic and social change and that these changes have been exacerbated by men like Arbab Ghulam Rahim.
And now we know that these factors are killing little babies in the Thar Desert. What are we going to do about it?
The writer is an analyst and commentator.