EDITORIAL: The cabinet must take note of the World Bank’s decision to downgrade the $200 million locust control project to ‘moderately successful’ barely a year after its approval after its second Implementation Status and Results Report found that “it may need to be restructured to align the design of the current locust situation and the needs of the country,” reflecting poorly on both the bank and the federal government. It turns out, as usual, that the hundreds of millions of dollars that the project was supposed to route to farmers to help them overcome the damage caused by the locust invasion last year very quickly had the bureaucracy salivating at the prospect of hijacking the funds to feed their own insatiable hunger for free money, luxury cars, and all that.
And indeed, even though the ministry of planning reportedly withheld the project’s approval for months seeing all the commotion in the ministry of national food and security, to capture key posts in it of course, eventually it too must have received the phone call that it couldn’t decline and duly signed on the dotted line. Therefore, the only progress worth mentioning so far, if it can be called that at all, is greenlighting procurement of 310 double-cabin vehicles, at a cost of Rs7.5 million per unit, 200 laptop computers, and creating of 322 positions that will make sure that the money goes where they want it to. And while there’s not much for farmers to look forward to in such an arrangement, it will definitely bloat the blue eyed of the civil service even further.
Surely, nobody in government needs to be reminded that the prime minister himself identified agriculture as one of his administration’s biggest challenges. That, more than anything else, probably pushed the new finance minister to talk about it so much at the time of the budget. And it’s already something of a shame that despite being an agrarian economy, one which could easily take care of its own staple food needs and also have enough left-over for exports, we now regularly go to the international market to buy our food; sometimes at top dollar prices. Last year’s locust attack, which should not have caught the government napping, dealt a serious blow not only to farmers, but also their productive lands. And in the one year that the said programme of the World Bank has been in operation, there has been zero progress in restoring targeted 90 percent of agriculture land back to productivity, no work has yet been done to develop early warning systems, not one affected family has received cash- or input-based assistance as promised, and even the locust monitoring is not operational.
And, the way things are going, chances are that the only thing that will happen is that civil servants will be driven to affected areas on their luxury cars only to file reports on their special laptops about how the project just isn’t working. Such things ought to seriously shake the government. For it is clear that there are elements in the official machinery that will put their own interests ahead of everything, even the fate of our farmers and the entire nation’s food basket. There is an urgent need to make sure that this project is brought back on track and made to deliver to the benefit of farmers instead of bureaucrats. The threat from the locusts might have dimmed a bit, but it hasn’t gone away completely. And how will the government, and all its donors, look should there be a repeat performance of the invasion sometime this or next year? Also, while this matter has the government’s attention, perhaps it wouldn’t be too much to hope that it will also sort out bureaucrats that are bent upon giving the entire service a bad name and the country an unaffordable food bill.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021