Back in  November, at the Pakistan Development Forum, the redoubtable Shahnaz Wazir Ali, Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on the Social Sectors (a Cabinet post), presented alarming figures suggesting that per capita caloric intake had dropped to 1650 cal/d, with a quarter of the population malnourished. I haven’t yet managed to track down the source of her data or the basis on which it is calculated, but FAO figures put the average in 2007  for least developed countries at 2157 cal/d.

In the media this morning, there are reports confirming that – in rural Sindh at least – a growing number of people are now starving:

Pakistan’s Sindh province, hit hard by last year’s floods, is suffering levels of malnutrition almost as critical as Chad and Niger, with hundreds of thousands of children at risk, Unicef said on Wednesday.

A survey conducted by the provincial government and the UN Children’s Fund revealed malnutrition rates of 23.1 per cent in northern Sindh and 21.2 per cent in the south.

Those rates are above the 15 per cent emergency threshold set by the World Health Organisation and are on a par with some of the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Northern Sindh also had a 6.1 per cent severe acute malnutrition rate and southern Sindh had 2.9 per cent, both far above the WHO thresholds.

“We are looking at hundreds of thousands of children at risk,” Unicef chief of communication Kristen Elsby told Reuters

It’s good to hear Unicef ringing the alarm – and Ms Wazir Ali is a powerful advocate in government for the plight of the poor – but this silent emergency provides yet more evidence of how poorly equipped national governments and the international system are even to understand what is happening as the pressure of resource scarcity ratchets up.

Time for someone to join up the dots, I think.

Today, for example, the papers report that the two main political parties (the ruling PPP, and its arch opponents, PML-N) have come together to try and fix an economic crisis that they admit has its main roots back in the 2008 resource price spike:

Sources said the government had told almost all parties that most of the economic pressure had built up because of carryover of huge fiscal deficit from the previous government which did not pass on energy prices to consumers even when international oil prices increased from $90 to $147 a barrel and the current government was facing a similar situation. Most public sector corporations have since been bleeding mainly because of this single factor.

Power companies are getting so desperate for fuel oil (which they are using to replace gas, whose shortage has led to an electricity crisis), that they’re signing sovereign-backed contracts for imports on deferred payments, going against the express wishes of the state-run Pakistan Oil Company, and, seemingly, without explicit permission from the government.

In Punjab, meanwhile, grain markets are grinding to a halt, as the government attempts to tax agricultural production in order to plug its yawning fiscal hole and – I suspect – to make it politically easier to raises taxes on urban consumption. Traders are on strike, accusing the government of destroying the ‘backbone’ of the economy.

The impact on ordinary people is marked. The gas shortage is pushing urban residents back towards a reliance on biofuel. “I am purchasing stove to use firewood in the 21^st century thanks to the government,” complains one resident of Rawalpindi.

Fortunately, food shortages are yet to hit one of the citizens of nearby Islamabad: President Zardari. He has his own camel in the Presidential Palace, because he thinks the milk is healthier.

The President House also has a herd of black goats. One goat is slaughtered everyday when Mr Zardari is there.

Earlier, his trusted personal servant, Bai Khan, used to buy a goat from Saidpur village every day, but now a herd has been kept in the presidency to avoid frequent visits to the animal market. The animal is touched by Mr Zardari before it is sent to his private house in F-8/2 for slaughtering.

Good to see one man, at least, taking resilience seriously.

A propos of Richard’s post on how the French used to behave in Cote d’Ivoire, let’s not forget how another member of the Security Council P5 – Russia – is behaving right now. Why, you might wonder, should Russia be blocking moves in the Security Council to step up the international community’s level of intervention in Cote d’Ivoire?  

Concerned about implications for its own restive regions, such as Chechnya, Russia has traditionally sought to thwart Security Council actions regarding nations’ sovereignty. But one western diplomat said Russian considerations over Ivory Coast were “90 per cent about oil, 10 per cent about sovereignty”.

Lukoil, Russia’s second biggest oil producer, has stakes in three deep-water blocks off the Ivorian coast, part of a largely untapped 1,000km oil frontier. Lukoil acquired its interests during Mr Gbagbo’s rule and changes of power in Africa have often been followed by reviews of oil and mineral rights.

On the face of it Pakistan may have bigger things to worry about, but recent weeks have seen it fall out with India over the humble onion:

The pungent vegetable is now at the centre of a mini diplomatic storm that has further soured relations between both countries over the past few days. The Pakistani commerce ministry banned the export of onions across the border by road and rail due to high prices and shortages at home.

Food inflation is running high across South Asia and onion prices are soaring in both Pakistan and India, as the two have had bad harvests of the crop. Reported hoarding and speculation in India have added to the crisis.

Onions are a touchy subject in India and past price hikes have brought down governments. In retaliation, farmers in Indian Punjab have stopped exporting vegetables to Pakistan.

A sideshow, surely, to the really big issues like Kashmir or religious extremism? Maybe not. You can’t spend anytime in Pakistan without noticing the powerful role played by resource scarcity in the country’s politics.

It all goes back to the global food and energy price spike of 2008. According to the IMF, growth had been robust up until that point and government finances were in reasonably good shape.

Conditions deteriorated in mid-2008 with the sharp increase in international food and fuel prices and worsening of the domestic security situation. The fiscal deficit widened, due in large part to rising energy subsidies, financed by credit from the central bank.

As a result, the rupee depreciated and foreign currency reserves fell sharply. Inflation reached 25 percent in mid-2008 [mostly food], causing harm to vulnerable social groups.

The country has never really made it back onto an even keel. The global economic crisis gave Pakistan a little relief, pushing commodity prices sharply lower, but the public finances never recovered.

And as food and energy prices have risen again, Pakistan has been hit by a succession of mini-commodity shocks (the sugar crisis of 2009 and 2010, the flour crisis of 2010). Some estimates suggest that higher food prices have led to a precipitous decline in caloric intake (though robust data is hard to track down).

Gas and electricity are in critically short supply, leading to frequent load shedding, for consumers, business, and industry in winter. Around the major cities, one sees trees being stripped bare by people desperate for heat for their houses and businesses:

Shopkeepers operating in the streets and mohallahs are using pieces of wooden and cardboard crates and other packing material to brace the chill in the air.

Many Lahorites are having ‘bonfires’ even during day time. An empty tin of cooking oil is usually converted into a hearth by making holes in it. Old newspapers, textbooks and copies besides parts of broken furniture are used to make fire as it is hard for many to afford Rs1,200 per 40 kilo fire wood or Rs40-50 per kilo coal.

There are no easy solutions. Pakistan has also been under intense pressure from the IMF and the United States to reduce fuel subsidies, in order to cut its deficit and meet the conditions of its IMF loan.

But its attempts to comply simply fuelled political instability. The PPP-led government came close to falling when it attempted to push up the cost of petrol at the end of 2010. Backing down was the price of getting its junior partner, MQM, back into the coalition late last week.

The result, though, has been unwelcome speculation that Pakistan may on the road to default – a worry that is likely to intensify as oil prices head ever higher.

Inflation is now up to 16%, with food prices expected to rise 20% in December 2010 (year-on-year). In November last year, onions jumped in price by 67% in just one month alone.

As in 2008, many of the drivers of the crisis are regional and global. While the attention of the world is fixated on Pakistan’s struggle with religious extremism. In the background, the struggle for resources seems to be doing as much to push this country towards ruin.

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Singapore, Djibouti, Bahrain, Kuwait, Guam, Brunei, US Virgin Islands, French Polynesia, Seychelles, Northern Mariana Islands, Andorra, Maldives, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, Qatar, UAE, St Lucia, Cayman Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, Aruba, Grenada, Malta, Kiribati, Oman, Iceland, Micronesia, Bahamas, Jordan, West Bank & Gaza, American Samoa, Solomon Islands, San Marino, Korea (Rep. of), Japan, Marshall Islands, Lebanon, New Caledonia, Mayotte, Egypt, Papua New Guinea, Netherlands Antilles, Israel, Costa Rica, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Palau

…all of which have 0.0 hectares of arable land per person, when rounded to one decimal place, according to World Bank data. (In fairness, any self-respecting Transitioner will probably argue back that with the latest permaculture techniques, they can feed a family of four on a parcel of land the size of a postage stamp – although see this post for some questions about those claims.)

More data from the same source: in 1960, the world had 0.39 hectares of arable land per capita. In 2007, the figure was 0.21 hectares – this even after the effects of massive deforestation to bring more cropland into production. Only four countries have more than 1 hectare of arable land per person: Niger (1.0), Canada (1.4), Kazakhstan (1.5) and Australia (2.1).

Here’s what you need to know. First, there are currently 263 rivers that either cross, or demarcate, international boundaries. Europe has most of them (69), followed by Africa (59), Asia (57), North America (40) and South America (38).  Here they are on a handy map (larger version at the link above):

Second, you should know that these international river basins account, according to OSU, for nearly one-half of the earth’s land surface; generate roughly 60% of global freshwater flow; and are home to approximately 40% of the world’s population. A taste of the vulnerabilities that come with this:

A total of 145 countries contribute territory to international basins. 33 nations, including such sizeable countries as Bolivia, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, and Zambia, have more than 95% of their territory within the hydrologic boundaries of one or more international basins. Perhaps even more significant is the number of countries that share certain individual basins … The Congo, Niger, Nile, Rhine, and Zambezi are each shared by more than 9 countries while the Amazon, Aral Sea, Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Jordan, Kura-Araks, La Plata, Lake Chad, Mekong, Neman, Tarim, Tigris-Euphrates-Shatt al Arab, Vistula, and Volga basins each contain territory of at least 5 sovereign nations.

Third, the good news. You might think that the quote above suggests that we’re in for a century of water wars. But it’s worth remembering this: “in the largest quantitative study of water conflict and cooperation, researchers at Oregon State University found that cooperative interactions between riparian states over the past fifty years have outnumbered conflictive interactions by more than two-to-one”.  Shared water has to date much more often been a stimulus for cooperation than for competition – a point our buddy Geoff Dabelko also makes consistently. This isn’t a new story, either: “the history of international water treaties dates as far back as 2500 bc, when the two Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma crafted an agreement ending a water dispute along the Tigris River”.

But… ah yes, there’s a but. And it is this:

158 of the world’s 263 international basins lack any type of cooperative management framework. Furthermore, of the 106 basins with water institutions, approximately two-thirds have three or more riparian states, yet less than 20 percent of the accompanying agreements are multilateral. Moreover, despite the recent progress noted above, treaties with substantive references to water quality management, monitoring and evaluation, conflict resolution, public participation, and flexible allocation methods, remain in the minority. As a result, most existing international water agreements continue to lack the tools necessary to promote long-term, holistic water management

On top of this, there’s the small matter of climate change to consider – and especially, Cleo Paskal’s observation that “water-sharing agreements, especially those based on a set amount of water, rather than percentage of actual flow, will become problematic as water levels alter dramatically” (Cleo has a new book out, btw). So, lots done – but lots to do.