Rising Food Prices Lead to Revolutions

In the US, when world wheat prices rise by 75%, it means the difference between a $2 loaf of bread and a loaf costing may be $2.10.

If, however, you live in Lahore, those skyrocketing costs really matter: A doubling in the world price of wheat actually means that the wheat you carry home from the market to hand-grind into flour for chapatis costs twice as much.

And the same is true with rice. if the world price of rice doubles, so does the price of rice in  your neighborhood market in Jakarta. And so does the cost of the bowl of boiled rice on an Indonesian family’s dinner table.

Welcome to the new food economics of 2011: Prices are climbing, but the impact is not at all being felt equally, for Americans who spend less than one-tenth of their income in the supermarket, the soaring food prices are an annoyance, and not a calamity. But for the planet’s poorest 2 billion people, who spend 50 to 70% of their income on food, these soaring prices may mean going from two meals a day to one. Those who are barely hanging on to the lower rungs of the global economic ladder risk losing their grip entirely. This can contribute-and it has-to revolutions and upheaval.

Additionally, farmers now face clear sources of increasing pressure. The first is population growth. Each year, the world’s farmers must feed 80 million additional people, nearly all of them in developing countries.

The world’s population has nearly doubled since 1970 and headed toward 9 billion by mid-century. Some 3 billion people, meanwhile, are also trying to move up the food chain, consuming more meat, milk and eggs.

As more families in China and elsewhere enter the middle class, they expect to eat better.

But as global consumption of grain- intensive livestock product climbs, so does the demand for the extra corn and soybeans needed to feed all the livestock. Grain consumption per person in the US, for example, is four times that in Pakistan, where little grain is converted into animal protein.

Sino Indian Relations

India has border disputes with almost all its neighbors which can be credited to the colonial rulers. In 1914, the McMahon Line was proposed as the boundary between British India andTibetat the Simla Conference butChinarefused to ratify this agreement. After the communists take-over in 1949, troops were sent to “liberate”Tibetin 1950. In 1954, agreed toTibetbeing “a region of China”. The situation however became complicated with the Khampa rebellion in 1956 forced some Tibetan leaders to flee and take refuge in Kalimpong inIndia. In 1959, large-scale uprisings in Tibet forced the Dalai Lama and many of his followers to flee Lhasa for India and the latter formally raised the boundary issue with China for the first time following the uprising. Indian premier Nehru met his Chinese counterpart Chouen Lai to resolve the dispute but failed. The impasse eventually resulted in a war between the two states in 1962 which resulted in a humiliating defeat for India.

The war, coupled with the change of leadership inChinain the seventies, resulted in a serious impasse in the Sino-Indian relations till the Indian foreign minister Vajpayee visitedChinain 1979 to break long hiatus in ties. This was followed a decade later by PM Rajiv Gandhi undertaking a visit toChinain 1988 which brought about a serious thaw in relations. The two countries in 1996 agreed on confidence-building-measures to keep borders tranquil and peaceful.

The situation however again aggravated whenIndiain May 1998 afterIndiajustified its nuclear tests as a result of security threats emanating fromChina. The tension then ensued till 2003 when PM Vajpayee traveled toChina, and the two sides agreed to the appointment of special representatives for resolving the boundary issue. In 2005, the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao paid a return visit and the countries entered into a strategic partnership. The two countries agreed on the framework for a settlement of the boundary issue on the basis of the “political parameters and guiding principles”; and “interests of the settled populations.” This was followed in 2006 by the Chinese President Hu Jintao visitingIndia; he announced ten points to further strengthen bilateral ties. Sonia Gandhi and Rahul also held talks with leaders in Beijing during their visit, followed by PM Manmohan Singh visiting Beijing and reaffirming India’s commitment for strong ties with China.

The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen said the ISI was supporting the Taliban-allied Haqqani network of militants that is blamed by Washingtonfor recent attacks on the USembassy and the US-led military alliance of NATO’s headquarters in Kabul.

A few days later, the US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Washington had to consider military action againstPakistan in the event of, what he called,Islamabad’s continued support for militant attacks against theUS troops inAfghanistan.

 

Gross Domestic Product ($ bn)	3,250.20	1,311.90
Annual growth rate (GDP)	9.40%	6.20%
Population below $1 a day	16.60%	34.70%
Population below $2 a day	46.70%	52.40%
Human Development Index world rank	81st	128th
Adult literacy	91%	61%
PhDs in science and engg each year	15,000	6,000
Training and vocational institutes	5,00,000	12,000
Health
Health expenditure per capita	$71.00	$31.00
Child mortality (under five years per 1,000)	24	76.00
Life expectancy (male) in years	70.8	63.20
Life expectancy (female)	74.6	66.70
Infrastructure
Electricity production (bn kWh)	2,199.60	667.80
Electricity consumption per capita (kWh)	1,585.00	457.00
Rail route (km)	62,200.00	63,465.00
Road network (km)	14,02,698	33,19,644
Sectoral break-up of GDP
Agriculture	11.80%	18.50%
Industry	48.70%	26.40%
Services	39.50%	55.10%
Foreign reserves ($ bn)	1,951	250
Defence budget ($ bn)	84.9	30
Agricultural and Industrial Production (Million tonnes/year)
Foodgrains	418	210
Steel	163	29
Cement	650	109
Crude oil	160	40
Coal	1,300	300
Trade
Exports ($ bn)	1,465	176
Imports ($ bn)	1,156	287
Indo-China trade volume	$51.8 bn
India’s balance of trade withChina	-$11.2 bn

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Criminals are Born

Recent research provides considerable support for th idea, long despised, that criminals are born rather than made; genes appear to count far more than upbringing.

Traits such as intelligence, aggressiveness, impulse control, optimism, and many other things, even political orientation, appear to be strongly affectd by a person’s genetic makeup.

By the same token, inadequate child-rearing does not appear to block th expression of valuable traits and abilities in children.

Whe important factors: such as the genetic similarities between parent and child, are controlled, single parenthood does not appear to be a major source of delinquency.

There are traits, such as activity level, distractibility, intensity of reaction, and quality of mood, that are relatively stable from infancy. Some combinations of traits produced infants who could be characterized as `easy’, and other combinations that are `difficult’.

 

Children with chronic histories of delinquency exhibit characteristic trait patterns, of which the most important appear to be low intelligence, especially in verbal abilities, deficient impulse control, and irritable or aggressive temperament.

 

Adolescent-onset delinquency is quite common. It is a normal response to the social restrictions on their emerging maturity. Childhood-onset delinquency is far less common, and the prognosis for these adolescents appears less sanguine. The latter, also suffering from lack of intellectual resources, are three times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime, and they commit such crimes at a much younger age than the adolescent-onset offenders.

 

Psychopathic traits are often present in people who have sustained frontal lobe damage. Such damage tends to interfere with foresight, impulse control, and emotional responsiveness. Many psychopaths are suffering from undetected neural deficits.

Psychopaths are egregious in their lack of empathy and conscience. The main difference between non-criminal psychopath and the socio-pathic career criminal may reside in their intelligence. High IQ people rarely become career criminals, even if their life experiences and temperamental characteristics put them at risk. On the other hand, many of the most notorious tyrants in history were intellectually brilliant, but psychopathically devoid of empathy. Perhaps a sizeable number of career criminals are unintelligent people with psychopathic dispositions. A good many of the world’s scoundrels are people with similar dispositions but more intelligence.

 

Gang membership contributes to criminal conduct. But traits associated with criminality also incline youngsters to join gangs.

 

Illegitimate kids, and women commencing sexual activity at a younger age, contribute to production of low IQ delinquent children.

 

Girls who become sexually active at young age are prone to exploitation by unscrupulous older males.

 

Imprisonment has eugenic effects in preventing reproduction by those deemed socially undesirable, at least during their period of incarceration. Criminals left in neighborhoods are free to court young girls, and it would hardly be surprising to discover that these men are among those who exhibit few qualms about exploiting them.

 

Aggressive men have few opportunities to reproduce if females are closely monitored by family and neighbors, and are often at a severe reproductive disadvantage if they fail to develop the capacity to support wives and children.

 

None of the above should be interpreted to mean that a person is destined by his genes to a life of crime. A person with genetic factors linked to criminality is no more destined to become a criminal than is a person with genes linked to high IQ destined to become a scientist. Genes do not program individual behavior in a vacuum; ecological factors play a role in what sort of genetic predispositions are expressed in phenotypic behavior. Some environments are more conducive than others for the expression of criminal traits. For that reason crime control almost always involves a considerable degree of environmental manipulation.

 

The social ecology of small towns serves to inhibit a wide variety of crimes that depend for their success on anonymity. In a small town where everyone knows everyone else, robbery is a high risk enterprise. Violent crime is higher in urban areas than in rural areas.

 

Crime rates can only remain at high levels if they are allowed to do so.

 

What Can be Done?

Strategize to limit the extent to which traits predispose children to criminality and when allowed to find destructive criminal expression.

 

Policies strengthening marriage and encouraging the postponement of child-bearing until marriage would help. Mature women in the market for husbands to support them are more likely to be prudent in their choices than girls following youthful infatuations.

 

Restore the old kind of police and court practices that worked in earlier times.

 

Enforce truancy laws and special schools for disruptive students. Truants are prime candidates for delinquency. Curfews for minors can be effective in reducing crime. Truancy laws and curfews take children off the streets where some succumb to the temptations of criminal behavior.

 

Immediate punishment for crime could deter it. Rioters and looters could be quickly brought under control by a massive police presence prepared to detain or immobilize law breakers. All totalitarian police states have been notable for their low crime rates, as have countries under military occupation. Crime cannot survive extensive surveillance and swift punishment.

 

Increase the police numbers and their deployment to crime prone neighborhoods.

 

None of the above meant to deny that seriously deficient mothering caused by drug addiction, alcoholism, or prostitution can have deleterious effects on children.

 

Children of inadequate mothers are more prone to crime because they inherit their mother’s or father’s  inadequacies than that they are driven into crime by those inadequacies.

 

Caring, consistent, and loving parents are clearly important for children’s happiness and well-being. The absence of a father appears to be painful to children in all walks of life. Many children grow up in seriously dysfunctional homes and suffer great unhappiness as a result. But few of these family conditions or child-rearring practices have a substantial impact on adult criminality.

 

Very few children are destined to be criminals because of inherited traits, but many with traits that put them at risk will gravitate toward criminality if not properly corrected. A small minority of youngsters will go seriously astray, and these are best dealt with by adequate law enforcement, not by the establishment of a corps of parenting police.

 

 

Byron M. Roth `Crime and Child-Rearing’, Society, Vol. 34, No 1, Nov – Dec 1996, pp. 39-45.

 

 

 

Access to Education in Poor Nations isnt a Diseases without a Cure

The jury is still out on whether the Dakar pledge will join the Jomtien compact in the crowded graveyard of overly ambitious development goals.

World Bank President James Wolfessohn declared that no country with a viable plan for achieving universal education should be allowed to fail for lack of resources.

Research shows that investment in education: particularly for girls, in the world’s poorest countries produces impressive health benefits and high economic returns. Education boostsws family income, and female education in particular leads to smaller, healthier families by lowering infant and maternal mortality and improving child nutrition.

Do the aid receiving nations lack the absorptive capacity and efficiency to channel resources effectively; or that corruption or politics diverts aid to unintended beheficiaries.

We need to overcome resistance to reform among entrenched domestic interests.

More rigorous performance monitoring is needed.

Aid recipient countries should be encouraged to develop explicit strategies for channeling freed-up resources toward poverty reduction.

Poor countries should be encouraged to be the authors of their own strategies.

Dakar Declaration called on recipient countries to devise plans to show HOW they might actually meet their stated education goals.

At Dakar, Unicef estimated that putting every child in quality primary education by 2015 would cost an additional $7 billion per year, but it has since increased the estimate to $9.1 billion.

In poor nations as in rich countries, education creates a foundation for economic growth, higher standards of living, better health, and a more informed citizenry.

Access to education in poor nations is not a diseases without a cure. Where there has been true high level commitment to expanding education, as in Uganda, Malawi, and the Indian state of Kerala, significant progress has been achieved.

Earthquake October 2005

The areas worst affected by the 2005 quake were among the poorest in Pakistan. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 43 percent of people in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and 34 percent in the North West Frontier Province lived below the poverty line. The losses inflicted by the natural disaster added immensely to people’s hardship.

The Population Explosion or Implosion

Thanx to sweeping mortality declines, human numbers nearly quadrupled in just 100 years, leaping from about 1.6 or 1.7 billion in 1900 to about 6 billion in 2000.

The world’s population currently totals about 6 billion, rather than 9 billion or more, because fertility patterns also changed over th course of the 20th centurey. And of all those diverse changes, without question the most significant was secular fertility decline: sustained and progressive reductions in family size due to deliberate birth control practices by prospective parents.

Barring catastrophe, the world’s total population can be expected to grown substantially over the coming quarter century. US Census Bureau projections for 2025 would place global population at over 7.8 billion, almost 30% largeer than today. Yet due to declining fertility, population growth is poised to decelerate markedly over the coming generation.

For Europe as a whole (including Russia), the calculated long-term volume of immigration required to avert overall population decline is nearly double the recent annual level: an average of 1.8 million net newcomers a year, versus the roughly one million net entrants a year in the late 1990s.

The world’s population is set to age markedly over the coming generation.

A Competent Teacher for Every Child Matters

It is the birthright of every child to ve access to a competent, caring, and a qualified teacher.

The above may be achieved by restructuring: increasing teachers’ knowledge to meet the demands they face and toward redesigning schools to support high-qualified teaching and learning.

Teachers’ salaries in Pakistan lag significantly behind those of other professions. This produces chronic shortages of qualified teachers in fields like mathematics and science and the continual hiring of large numbers of teachers who are unprepared for their jobs.

We should ve no more tolerance for incompetence in the classroom. Children are compelled to attend school. The State supposedly guarantees them equal protection under the law, and a sound education. In the face of these obligations, students ve a right to competent, caring teachres who work in schools organized for success.

The State should aim to ensure that all schools ve teachers with the knowledge and skills they need to enable all children to learn. If a caring, qualified teacher for every child is the most important ingredient in education reform, then it should no longer be the factor most frequently overlooked.

The State should provide a coherent, high quality curriculum across the grades; and designed to support teachers’ collective work and learning.

A more complex, knowledge-based, and multicultural society creates new expectations for teaching. To help diverse learners master more challenging content, teachers must go far beyond dispensing information, giving a test, and giving a grade. They must themselves knnow their subject areas deeply, and they must understand how students think, if they are to create experiences that acutally work to produce learning. Developing the kind of teaching that is needed will require much greater clarity about what students need to learn in order to succeed in the world that awaits them and what teachers need to know and do in order to help students learn it. Standards that reflect these imperatives for student learning and for teaching are largely absent in our nation today.

The State may consider introducing some form of a teaching license for testing.

Unequal resources and inadequate investments in teacher recruitment are major problems. Other industrialized countries fund their schools equally and make sure there are qualified teachers for all of them by underwriting teacher preparation and salaries. However, teachers sometimes in Pakistan may go into substantial debt to become prepared for a field which pays less than any other occupation requiring a degree.

There is no real system for recruiting, preparing, and developing Pakistan’s teachers. Major problems include:

Inadequate Teacher Education

Haphazard Hiring & Induction

Lack of Professional Development & Rewards for Knowledge & Skill

Schools Structured for Failure

It should be Pakistan’s Goal to ve

All Children to be taught by teachers who ve the knowledge, skills, and commitment to teach children well.

All teacher education programs meet professional standards, or they will be closed.

All teachers should ve access to high-quality professional development, and should ve regularly scheduled time for collegial work and planning.

Both teachers and principals should be hired and retained based on their ability to meet professional standards of practice.

Teachers’ salaries should be based on their knowledge and skills.

High quality teaching should be the central investment of schools.

What it takes to be an effective teacher: subject-matter expertise coupled with an understanding of how children learn and develop; skill in using a range of teaching strategies and technologies; sensitivity and effectiveness in working with students from diverse backgrounds; the ability to work well with parents and other teachers; and assessment expertise capable of discerning how well children are doing, what they are learning, and what needs to be done net to move them along.

FATA

The FATA is the poorest, least developed part of Pakistan. Literacy is only 17 percent, compared to the national average of 40 percent; among women it is 3 percent, compared to the national average of 32 percent. Per capita income is roughly $250-half the national average of $500. Nearly 66 percent of households live beneath the poverty line. Only 10,000 workers now find employment in the FATA’s industrial sector. The FATA’s forbidding terrain further serves to isolate tribal communities from markets, health and education services, and many outside influences.