Criminal waste Pakistans curse

Source: Deccan Herald

The report Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not brought out by a UK organisation underscores the
unconscionable wastage of food worldwide.

It says that of the roughly 4 billion metric tons of food produced in the world annually, almost half fails
to reach stomachs and gets dumped instead as garbage. The report blames poor harvesting, storage and
transport methods as well as irresponsible retailer and consumer behaviour for the wastage of food.
While much of the wastage in developing countries is on account of poor storage and transport facilities,
in the advanced countries tonnes of vegetables and fruits are thrown away for flimsy reasons -- because
they do not look good, not of the rights size or colour and so on. A vast amount of vegetables and fruits
are not harvested, the report says, because of they do not meet the appearance criteria of retailers and
consumers. Retailers and customers do not buy food that doesnt look attractive but also, they waste
food they have bought because of poor understanding of concepts such as expiry dates.

Wastage of any resource is deplorable. It is more so when it is of food and in a world facing severe
malnutrition and hunger, even starvation. In 2010, the UNs Food and Agricultural Organisation
estimated that there are 925 million hungry people i.e. one of every seven people on this planet is
hungry. And the number has grown steadily every year since 1995. Neglect of agriculture, recession and
the rise in food prices have been blamed for the surging hunger crisis in recent years. To this we could
add wastage of food.

India is among the worst offenders in this regard. We can take pride in being a grain surplus country. Yet
inadequate and poor storage facilities have resulted in millions of tons of grain going waste as it lies out
in the open and is destroyed by rain and rats. Trains and trucks run late delaying delivery of perishable
food items to markets. Little has been done to address these issues. There is wastage too at the level of
the individual consumer. Roughly 1520 per cent of food at weddings and other social gatherings is not
eaten. Neither do we bother to send it to the hungry. The global community needs to act at various
levels international, national, local and individual to halt the wastage of food. Achieving the
Millennium Development Goal of halving global hunger by 2015 will be possible if we halt this trashing
of food.

Even by Pakistans blood-soaked standards, Thursday was particularly brutal. Three blasts in Baluchistan,
one in the Swat region of the North West Frontier Province and another in Karachi claimed the lives of
116 people with over 250 others injured. The deadliest of the attacks were those at a snooker parlour in
Quetta for which the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi has claimed responsibility. A Sunni extremist group, the LeJ
clearly intended to eliminate as many Shias as possible. It targeted a snooker parlour in a predominantly
Shia neighbourhood. A suicide bombing at the parlour was followed up with a car bomb explosion five
minutes later, which killed cops and journalists who had arrived at the bloody site. Pakistan is no
stranger to violence and its people have become inured to blood and gore. Still, Thursdays deadly
bombings were extraordinarily savage. They have left ordinary Pakistanis shocked and groping for
answers.

Sectarian violence, always serious in Pakistan, has assumed alarming proportions over the past year.
Around 400 Shias were killed in attacks by radical Sunni groups in 2012. Other minorities, such as
Hindus, Sufis and Ahmadiyas too suffered grievously at the hands of Sunni bigots. Thursdays violence
does not bode well for 2013. The Pakistani state cannot escape responsibility for the bloodletting. It is
complicit in the violence, having set up outfits like the Sipah-e-Sahiba and the LeJ. The Pakistani
government often claims that it is cracking down on extremism, pointing to its proscription of the LeJ,
the Lashkar-e-Toiba and other outfits. Banning a group is meaningless when the state refuses to cut its
umbilical cord with these terror organisations.

Pakistan was conceived as a homeland for South Asias Muslims. But clearly this is no safe haven for
Muslims, as Ahmadiyas realised in the 1950s and Sufis and Shias woke up to thereafter. Indeed today,
with Shias hitting back at Sunnis, and Sunni Deobandis and Barelvis turning their guns at each other,
even the Sunni majority is vulnerable. Pakistan is haemorrhaging but its rulers are doing nothing about
it. It is likely that they will respond to Thursdays bloodletting by blaming it on dark forces and foreign
enemies. Externalising the enemy will not halt the bleeding. The enemy is within; it is the ISI. Unless the
ISIs ties with terrorism are surgically cut, Pakistan will implode.