Depleted

According to the data on the State Bank of Pakistan website, our combined exports for the financial year 2018 for the food group and the textile group amounted to US$ 18.1 billion out of a total exports for the year of US$ 24.7 billion; about 74%. And this does not include leather exports which technically can be clubbed with agriculture exports. For the record, the increase in exports from last year is 12.7%; unfortunately imports increased by 14.6%.
And let us not forget, agriculture needs water.
In his book "The Logic of Failure", Dietrich Dorner narrates an interesting story about him inviting an economist and physicist from a well-known industrial enterprise to test their planning skills on a computer simulated problem; the point being "do we pay enough attention to possible side effects and long term repercussions". The problem related to a West African Tribe called Moros who were suffering from infant mortality, famine and low life expectancy. Money was made available to the two experts for any solutions that they could dream up, and a lot of that money was spent by the two experts on deeper wells to improve irrigation. Predictably, as the years sped by, within minutes in the computer simulation, initially things went amazingly well for the Moros; food increased and hence so did the standard of living, the population doubled, cattle increased and infant mortality came down. Abundant water from the new wells enlarged the pasture lands. As the computer simulated years crept on, twenty years later, without any source of replenishment the groundwater ran out, primarily due to overuse by an increased population of the tribe and the cattle. Thereafter, the situation became hopeless, without water, and much to the irritation of the two experts no amount of money could come up with any solution beyond outside food aid, which empirical evidence shows is generally limited to sustenance.
Let's just focus on the moral of the story; with an increasing population if water is not replaced, it will be gone!
The water is gone, or almost gone, in Pakistan and what are our solutions? Well we continue to endlessly argue over one dam for reasons which are if not intensely comical, are absurd. How can building a dam ultimately necessary for the survival of a nation become so controversial that politicians across the board are fraught to even whisper its name for fear of fatal consequences, is a perfect case study for why democracy is a failure. And if that was not enough, an attempt to educate and galvanize the populace into building another dam on a self help basis is endlessly ridiculed by the intelligentsia. The experts insist that dams cannot be built through charity; maybe they can't, but we have failed hopelessly in building them by any other means as well. Ridiculously, after spending billions over the past few years, our government could only acquire land to build the dam; seriously were we buying land from India?!
According to Natural News, via Google, it takes some 2,000 gallons of water to produce one gallon of Cow Milk. Again, as per Google, IME state that to produce one-kg of meat requires between 5,000 and 20,000 litres of water whereas to produce one-kg of wheat requires between 500 and 4,000 litres of water. Without getting into a debate over the exact litres needed, simply focus on the impact water stress can have on Pakistan's food self-sufficiency. A nation dependent on others for its food and water is worse that a colony; external debt will look like a joke if we don't take steps to reverse the water stress. And for those harping about democracy and freedom of every kind, please read the history books, Viceroys were never elected.
My favourite conspiracy is IMF repeatedly excluding building of dams in their programme conditions, right after the conspiracy why they have never insisted that we curtail imports to improve the trade balance. But then as evidenced from the statistics at the beginning, the problem with falling exports is entirely linked with water; admittedly not diversifying into other industrial ventures is also a big reason. According to indexMundi, Pakistan recorded its highest ever production of cotton at 11.1 million 480lb bales in 2004; for the past decade, our cotton production has more or less been stagnant at 8.5 million bales, with perhaps a declining trend. The question is how on earth we even believed that financial incentives will increase our exports when we have done absolutely nothing to increase our produce.
"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist", Kenneth Boulding.
Many have written before about building dams and the coming tough times due to water stress, some even campaign about it relentlessly; unfortunately most of all this has fallen on deaf ears. The opinion makers, the celebrity anchors on prime time television, for some inexplicable reason believe that the deemed tussle between their champions of democracy and the establishment is much more important for the masses to understand than the urgent necessity of building dams. Let them play the fiddle while Pakistan's water reservoirs get further depleted?
(The writer is a chartered accountant based in Islamabad. Email: [email protected])