Pakistan is not poor because it is over populated

A seminar was hosted lately in a local hotel in Lahore to discuss the issues afflicting Pakistan, as the sixth most populated country, sitting over seven billion people of the world. It was argued that price hike, poverty and unemployment in Pakistan are the results of population explosion. One could not reason over this argument, but with a tinge of astonishment. We contradict ourselves only by indulging in things without thinking. One wonders if it is the sheer number of people that is keeping the government of Pakistan or whosoever is at the helm of the affairs, to make sustainable development efforts so as to put Pakistan on the road of progress. One also wonders if it was over population that has tied the hands of our leaders to dig more gas, oil and other resources. One wonders yet again, does the institutional break down that Pakistan is facing today owes its failure to all those people who were born insanely over the years. The more one tries to develop a relationship between population growth and the economic development in Pakistan; the wonder list will keep on growing.

Resource mismanagement
Pakistan is not poor because it is overpopulated; it is poor because it has not drawn on its resources adequately. No sane person would attribute Pakistan’s resource crises to overpopulation. It is the making of our own doing. We know we have not planned our economy. We have misused resources and flouted them with vengeance. Balochistan is the least populated area of Pakistan, but with worst poverty indicators. It houses only 5.1 per cent of population of Pakistan in a territory covering 43 per cent of Pakistan’s total land. In the words of an independent economist, Wazir Ahmed, there is an “equitable distribution of poverty in Balochistan”. According to the Pakistan Labour force survey 2009-10, unemployment rate in Balochistan is 33.4 per cent, with poverty at 48 per cent for the urban and 51 per cent at the rural level. Nearly 90 per cent people, whether literate or illiterate are jobless or unemployed. Situation becomes more critical when we find out that, of the one million cultivable lands in Balochistan, the provincial government earns no more than a million rupees from agriculture, in other words, one rupee per acre. So far used as a mineral resource and trade route only, Balochistan has been exploited by wide margins through people known to exploitation a mean to their own ends. Going back to the aforementioned seminar, the reason why Pakistan is feeling the heat of inflation and unemployment is because our economy is dysfunctional. The engines of economy: energy, communications, transportations, and financial institution have turned into carcasses, eaten and depleted by corruption and law and order. The saga of not adding anything to our electric grid and the mismanagement of gas through ill planned CNG and LPG sectors speaks volume of the disrespect we have shown to the nature. Unless we had exhausted all our options in optimally using the resources at our disposal, blaming population explosion responsible for our economic woes sounds un-pragmatic. This brings us to the human resource; Pakistan’s population has 70 per cent people below the age of 25. There is great risk out there, in case we fail to direct this tsunami of people to the right direction, it’s going to devour us all.

Demographic Dividend
The assumption goes that having a burgeoning youth is a dividend to a society not in the sense of vitality, but as a human resource. With higher youth population, we can put more energy into our economic activity by mean of better ideas, skilled labour and innovative approach, only if we raise them so. If they were to become a collection of youth, forming a crowed, to be fed only, then it surly becomes a burdened. However, if provided targeted academic opportunities and different options to explore potentials, the rising population would suddenly become a matter of rejoice. Look at Imran Khan and now on the heels of him the Sharif mafia, suddenly inspiring to the youth, knowing that the future of each party depends on the decisions of the youth at the ballot box. According to CIA WorldFact book, beside 15.4 per cent unemployment, there exists substantial underemployment in Pakistan. Age structure of a population affects a nation’s key socio economic issues. Countries with young population need to invest more on education. We in Pakistan are investing only 2 per cent of our GDP on education that too is not invested optimally. The situation of our dismal business and economic opportunity could be gauged from the fact that on the country review day in the Common Wealth business forum held on 27th October in Perth, hardly 50 participants attended the show in the room with over 300 seating capacity. Unless we provide for the provision of resources we cannot curse over population being the cause of underdevelopment.

Is nature dumb and stoic?
The world is now populated by 7 billion people. Scarcity of resources certainly become as issue when the question of feeding seven billion people comes to mind. Suddenly the Malthus scare, the famine stricken Africa, the rising poverty level of underdeveloped countries and the environmental hazards begins to make sense in a way that we start reasoning that had there been lesser people on this earth all these miseries, food crisis, carbon emission, financial insecurities and would have been avoided or could have been resolved without delay. The million dollar questions is that, are resources really scarce or is nature that dumb and stoic so as not to offer substitute to make for the loss of one commodity in the case of scarcity? Population being a paradoxical subject has more than one viewpoints defending and rejecting its expansion. To a market economist and to the reformists overpopulation has little relevance to quality of life. People lead their through learned behaviours, even the genetics have to be streamlined and evolved under right tutelage to make a difference. If people are poor, illiterate, unhealthy, unemployed, unskilled, uncouth or terrorist, it is because they have not been provided with an environment where they could have been none of these. It is lack of provision of resources that makes the mass of people look bigger, larger and ultimately a liability. Today we talk hoarse about the unequal distribution of resources that leaves a great number of people in a given country deprived of facilities enjoyed by the so called blessed people. Exploitation of resources is always given as the reason for this designed gap, between have and have not, where some are pushed left on the continuum of well being while a few knock together to the right. In corollary it is the right distribution and continuous identification, addition, and redistribution of resources that takes care of more members adding to the world family.

Resource base does not remain fixed
When horse powered transportation lost the ability to serve the rising demand of over populated world, railroads and the motor car were developed and when schoolhouses become crowded, we built new schools…more modern and better than the old one. The diversity and versatility of nature have taken care of many diminishing resources owing to being overused. When elephant tusks were no more available for ivory billiard balls, celluloid was invented followed by the rest of our plastics, when trees became scare in sixteen century human beings learned to use coal. Satellites and fibre optics (derived from sand) replaced expensive copper for telephone transmission. The development and progress in science and technology occurred what we called out of diminished resources, when there was a shortage, manmade or natural, when there was a need to have more for more people, there were more exploration, development and innovation.

Unfounded Malthusian fear
For the Malthusian, rising population has sharp jaws that could go deep into the system of human welfare and tear it into pieces. In order to live in harmony and peace with adequate resources, the world should have lesser people. If a family is poor, it is so because they have chosen to be so, therefore the burden of fewer resources should be borne by them for making wrong choices, in this case not planning their family. It is due to this very theory that in many countries the emphasis to have fewer children been enforced upon the poor, believing that it is they who have more children and therefore every denunciation and every family planning policy should be directed toward them. However, nearly in every case, Pakistan as well as in India, this policy has fired back for want of wrong need assessment and problem identification, behind having more than two children. In countries like Pakistan and India, spiritual leanings, male issue, old age insecurities have been the reasons behind having extended families. China with its one child policy is facing skewed population with a stock of baby boomers progressing without any young following succeeding them. The answer to the puzzle, especially in the case of poor and marginalised people, did not lay in asking them to have few children, but to educate them, provide them with health facilities so that they could think clear, give them level playing professional fields and engage the patriarchal and tribal societies into discourse valuing the birth of a baby girl. It is all about how seriously we take our resources and their usability. The colonial era expanded because the colonialists were in the search of new markets, diverse labour and better resources. They did succeed. Today, it is interregional and international trade and interconnectivity of business that can serve the overpopulated world with endless opportunities. Only we have to learn to think diverse.

Durdana Najam is a freelance feature writer. She can be reached at [email protected]