Opinion

Hunger, Thirst, Disease, and the Billionaires
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA

Jeffrey D. Sachs, the famous economist, names the world’s top five wealthiest people (William Gates and Warren Buffett from the US; Carlos Slim Helu, Ingvar Kamprad, and Lakshmi Mittal from Mexico, Sweden and India respectively), and contends that “if today’s billionaires were to pool their resources, they could outflank the world’s governments in ending poverty and pandemic disease”. And according to Forbes magazine, there are some 950 of them in the world, with an estimated combined wealth of $3.5 trillion. They can keep their yachts, mansions and luxury living, and still spare nearly $3.5 trillion to change the world.
“Suppose they pooled their wealth, as Buffett has done with Bill and Melinda Gates… their $3.5 trillion endowment (through a foundation), would have a 5% payout of about $175 billion a year, an amount sufficient to extend basic health care to all in the poorest world; end massive pandemics of AIDS, TB and malaria; jump-start an African Green Revolution; end the digital divide; and address the crying needs for safe drinking water for 1 billion people”. In short, this billionaires’ foundation would be enough to end extreme poverty itself.
Sometimes, history is a good guide, and it is full of examples in which individuals did set concrete examples by putting their millions to good use. A century ago, Rockefeller established his foundation through two initial gifts of total $100 million. It went a great way “in the eradication of hookworm in the US South, helped pave the way for the region’s economic development; supported the Nobel-prizewinning work that created the yellow-fever vaccine; helped Brazil in the elimination of a malaria-transmitting strain of mosquito; and perhaps most stunningly, helped fund the Asian Green Revolution, which brought transformative agricultural success to countries like India; and it helped other countries to escape endless cycles of famine and poverty”, reports Time, May 21, 2007.
The $30 billion of Bill and Melinda Gates, backed by another $31 billion of Warren Buffett, can and will do the same. Bill Gates Foundation is focused on the technology that would eventually end poverty on the global basis. He has expanded his original focus now, and through health technologies, aims to improve agriculture and fresh water supply, the two areas so essential in the fight against poverty.
The World Bank estimates that 1.1 billion people live in extreme poverty, and Asia leads in numbers. But Africa has the largest proportion. Bobo, the famous singer, once quoted former Secretary of State, Mr. Collin Powell, “The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty”, …in tense, nervous times isn’t it cheaper, and smarter to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them?”. And he is right.
Poverty is not a social or economic condition; it is a disease that warrants a clinical approach. Mr. Moises Naim of “Foreign Policy”, in his editorial May/June 2006 edition, underpins a very important point, “The wealthy seem to be leaving the impoverished further and further behind, … twenty years ago, Forbes, in its first ranking of wealth, found 140, (now 950) billionaires… in Asia alone, the number of millionaires grew by some 700,000 between 2000 and 2004. The increase in the number of the millionaires does not mean the decrease in the number of the poor. Every fifth person still lives in abject poverty.
The government of Pakistan claims that it has reduced poverty from over 32% to 23.2 %. Other surveys dispute these numbers. They contend that between 35% to 45% people live in a state of destitution; an additional 25% people live on the border-line of poverty, but are just, “one or two doctor-visits away from it; this sums up a total 65% of the people. Of the rest of the 35%, some 15% to 20% seem to be belonging to the fast decreasing class, popularly known as the middle-class, i.e. neither poor, nor rich. Mr. Shahid–ur-Rehman in 1997 published a book, “Who Owns Pakistan?”, in which he included the list of “Pakistan’s Robber Barons. He named Nishat Group at the top of the list, and Kohistan at the bottom of this list of total 38 individuals or groups of industries. The loot and plunder carried out by these very rich people has been so blatant and open that it greatly helps one to understand why so many people in Pakistan are so poor, and so few so rich.
A business shark secured 38 loans totaling Rs 3.5 billion through fake collateral, and now lives happily abroad; a sugar mill set up at a cost of Rs. 300 million was sold for a token price of rupee one; the government majority shares in Pakistan’s biggest chain of hotels were dished out free to a social climber, and was also given a loan to facilitate him purchase the hotels and then get the loan written off; 1,500 individuals and firms make use of 80% of the total bank credits, and some Rs.130 billion got stuck in bad loans, and Rs. 8.2 billion had to be written off. These are just a few examples.
If these Bill Gates of Pakistan, namely the House of Habib (900 units), Mian Mohammad Mansha (45 companies); Ittefaq (29 units), Sadruddin Hashwani (25 companies), Monnoos (18 textile mills and sugar mills), Farooq Hassan who lived in a house insured at 4 million dollars, Bashir Ahmed of Escort group who prided himself by living in a house that sprawled over 40,000 square feet in Lahore, Farida Saigol whose abode spread over 68 Kanal of land; Seth Abid who owned a prime real estate in Lahore bought through his front men to the worth of Rs. 5 billion; Ghulam Mohammad Mehr who owned 100,000 acres of land and Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi who fell second to Mehr with 80,000 acres, … had pooled their resources, poverty and disease would have been history in Pakistan. These and the remaining 32 (total 44) whose true worth is known only to God, but who according to one estimate, have a net worth of over Rs. 500 billion, which in 1997 just equaled the total size of Pakistan’s budget, and is about 30% of Pakistan’s total budget for the year 2007/08 (1,874 billion). If these barons of Pakistan had acted like Rockefeller, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and the Google Guys - Larry Page and Sergey Brin - to the tune of just 15%, Pakistan would have been next to Singapore and South Korea.
Andrew Cornegie, another philanthropist, wrote in 1889 that “the day is not far distant when the man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was free for him to administer during life, will pass away unwept, un-honored, and unsung”.
Foreign Policy magazine of May/June 2006 mentions Pakistan at number 9 in its list of 20 most unstable countries of the world. Afghanistan at number 10 is shown a little less stable as are Guinea, Liberia, North Korea, Burundi, Yemen, Sierra Leone, Burma and Bangladesh. Pakistan is thirsty, hungry and physically diseased. “ Pakistan had the brains; Pakistan had the money”. It could easily solve such basic problems of access to fresh drinking water; good schooling; and good healthcare. But, somehow, it did not meet those responsibilities. The yearning for democracy may be the right wish, but does it ensure stability and prosperity of the country?
In China one major illness typically reduces family income by 16 percent; further complications ensure an even faster spiral into lasting poverty. Is it not true of Pakistan as well? Millions in Pakistan live just one illness away from financial disaster. Gujarat of India may have achieved a high growth rate for more than a decade; its healthcare still remains a severe problem, and thrusts thousands into poverty each year.
The government has announced an increase of Rs. 600 in minimum wages, raising it from Rs.4,000 to Rs.4,600. Is that the solution? The question is: Who has the responsibility for helping the poor? The government or the poor themselves! The poor are neither idle nor lazy; most of them are working, and yet are poor. The fact is that they never make enough to provide themselves with a roof over their heads. It is the government that is shamefully negligent of them. India and Indonesia have hit the nail on the head by introducing a scheme of allotting small house and garden plots of land to the poor. This sense of ownership has begun infusing in them a new sense of self-esteem, a feeling that they also own a portion of the country they live in. Pakistan on the contrary encourages the construction of wall cities within cities.
In America some 13% people live below the poverty line; but this poverty is of a cyclical nature, i.e. individuals rise above and fall below the poverty threshold from time to time. Moreover, even the poorest of the poor commonly has adequate food, clothing and shelter. Very few have remained trapped in poverty since the starving times at Jamestown during the winter of 1609-10. In Pakistan those who were poor in 1947, very few have succeeded in extricating themselves from that trap, and a greater number have remained trapped in this cycle.
The rich will have to change their attitude towards the poor, because the poor are poor because of them. The government must stop fiddling with the numbers, because percentages do not feed a hungry man. The Yamuna River, once used to be the lifeline of New Delhi; now it is an open sewer. So is River Ravi. Industrial pollution and waste into rivers is fast destroying the sources of clean water. “It is a failure of governments, to either set priorities… or to meet basic needs”, says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security.
In teeming New Delhi, or Karachi and Lahore, middle-class denizens tote the latest cell-phones, but their home faucets, at best work a few hours a day, or not at all. A third of the city’s water is lost in cracked, aging pipes. The poor living in slums don’t have even that much. They must wait for water to arrive in trucks, which costs them more than piped water. No wonder, a lack of sanitation and clean water have helped make diarrhea the world’s No.2 killer of children. What Mr. Andrew Hudson, director of water governance for the United Nations Development Program said is equally true of Pakistan. “They have water to drink. That’s not the problem. They do not have safe water to drink”.
Studies have shown, says US News, June 4, 2007 that providing clean water and sanitation brings tremendous benefits. Health costs go down. People live longer, stay healthier, and become more productive. But “financiers… want to invest in energy, telecoms, highways, high-speed trains, you name it”, says Harvard’s Rogers. “The problem is, water yields social benefits, so no one individual can afford to do it”.
Pakistan does not lack water; it just wastes it; it grows crops that are water-hungry, like the rice and sugarcane. Its agriculture consumes more than 75% fresh water, a good portion of it, say 35%, gets wasted. Its government has found a novel way of finding a rationale for the constructions of dams, by deliberately starving people and by keeping them in a perpetual state of thirst, because it cannot face those who have politicized the need for the dams. If 65% of the population of Pakistan carries a cellular phone, and 90% of the youth live and sleep with it; it does not mean that Pakistan is on its own to economic progress.
A cellular phone in a poor man’s house is an effective means of further sliding the family into the deep hole of poverty. If half of all personal bankruptcies in the United States are due to high medical expenses, million of people in Pakistan are also one illness away from financial disaster. And the government’s efforts are ill-suited to the challenge. And lo! Pakistan’s WAPDA holds the title of being the nation’s second most corrupt body, writes Far Eastern Economic Review of May, 2006. Guess which body is the first.

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