A move long overdue

THE report that the federal government is thinking in terms of transferring four subjects to the provinces deserves to be welcomed because it gives an indication of Islamabad’s belated awareness of the need for greater devolution of power to the constituent units. Pakistan is a federation only in name; the centre has always dominated, and this has led to heart-burning and grievances among the provinces, leading to serious consequences such as the break-away of East Pakistan. Today, Balochistan, territorially the largest province, has grievances against Islamabad ranging from denial of a greater share in mineral resources to its belief that it is being denied even such rights as have been guaranteed by the Constitution. The 1973 Basic Law does not have a provincial list. It has a long federal list and a concurrent list, and it has been left to the provinces “to make laws with respect to any matter not enumerated in either the federal legislative list or the concurrent legislative list” (Article 142-c). Even though successive military dictators have carried out arbitrary changes in the Constitution and robbed it of its parliamentary character, it never occurred to any one of them to amend the Constitution in a way that would change the over-centralised federal set-up because that would have made them lose some of their own power. Against this background, the proposed transfer of health, education, agriculture and industry to the provinces looks like breaking new ground in our federal scheme of things.

At present industry is a federal subject, but the Council of Common Interests has been empowered to “formulate and regulate policies in relation to matters in Part II of the federal list” (Article 154). This implies a partial provincial role in industry. Agriculture and health have been provincial subjects since the British days because neither is mentioned in the two lists. Nevertheless, the report raises a question or two about how this should be done. In the first place, the transfer of at least one subject, development of industries — which is mentioned in Part II of the federal legislative list — will require a constitutional amendment according to the procedure laid down in the Basic Law. Second, there is a lot of bureaucratic duplication in these subjects, because there are overlapping ministries and departments at the centre as well as in the provinces. Precisely how the new scheme will work will depend upon how the federal government and the provinces go about it and develop a working relationship that promotes the people’s welfare.

With the transfer of the four subjects, the federal government will cut off funding to the provinces for development plans because they are going to receive a higher amount of money from the divisible pool as a result of the revised National Finance Commission award. This makes one believe as if an accountant’s mentality pervades the scheme. The provinces’ sources of revenue are limited. That is the reason why the provincial governments have to depend on Islamabad for their annual development plans. It is doubtful that the larger funding available as a result of the NFC award will make the provinces happy when the federal government cuts off funding for development projects in these four areas. Nevertheless, in principle, the move to transfer the four subjects could lead to the creation of a provincial list of subjects and enlarge the scope of provincial autonomy. The existence only of the federal and concurrent lists and the exclusion of a provincial list are a great anomaly.

Job placement for students

THE idea of setting up career placement centres at 25 universities for talented IT students is an excellent one. To be managed by the Software Export Board, these centres will arrange for 6,000 or so three-year internships for students in IT companies in the country. This will provide the students the opportunity for on-the-job training. Since this discipline at present has the greatest demand in the job market, it makes sense that the graduates are provided practical training so that their employers do not find them misfits and out of step with the actual needs of business and industry. This will be encouraging for the students, especially the meritorious ones, for they will be absorbed immediately by industry through a smooth process.

The ministry of IT is to be commended for this move. But this idea should also be adopted by other departments concerned with any sector of the economy which provides jobs on a big scale to university graduates. The fact is that our universities are quite insulated and not working hand in collaboration with industry and business. That is why a common complaint of the industrial and business sectors is that the students who graduate lack the practical knowledge, orientation and skills that are needed in the job market. This creates problems for the new entrants and is frustrating for the employers as well. It has been repeatedly emphasised that a close link should be created between the universities and industry and business. This will help the universities tailor their curricula to the needs of the economy. It would also open new avenues for research since industries could draw upon the research talent of the universities.

If this process of forging links is institutionalised at the national level and trade and industry cooperate in a big way, it would become possible to monitor the employment market and streamline university capacities accordingly. By increasing or decreasing the number of seats in line with the expansion or recession in a particular sector of the economy, the government can avoid a glut of unemployed graduates in one field or their shortage in another.

Ban on wedding meals

THAT the ruling party and opposition members of the National Assembly can come together on issues “of general public interest” was proved on Tuesday when a bill aimed at allowing the serving of one dish at weddings was supported by all. Once passed, the one-dish provision will remove a major sense of public dissatisfaction — both of hosts and guests — over a total ban on feasting at wedding imposed some years ago. For one thing, the ban on meals did not achieve the intended purpose of reducing the financial burden on families, notably the bride’s parents, who remained almost as heavily burdened because of heavy dowry demands from the other side. If anything, the ban was often openly flouted with receptions held under some pretext or the other — many people pretended that they were holding an ‘aqiqa’ ceremony — while others chose to bribe officials to be able to serve meals to guests. The catering industry was also badly affected by the ban while wedding halls and hotels raised up their rates to make up for the ban on meals. Whether these problems of deceptions and inconveniences can be got out of the way if the proposed bill is passed remains in question.

The amount of time spent deciding — or not deciding — such an ostensibly simple thing as the number of dishes at weddings shows how difficult it is to bring about societal reforms through legislation, however well-intentioned this particular law was. This is particularly so in a society like ours where the powerful can get away with violating all laws. Creating public awareness on issues such as wasteful expenditure on weddings should be of greater concern for both the authorities and civil society organisations.

Junk food, violent behaviour

DOES television cause crime? The idea that people copy the violence they watch is debated endlessly by criminologists. But this column concerns an odder and perhaps more interesting idea: if crime leaps out of the box, it is not the programmes that are responsible as much as the material in between.

It proposes that violence emerges from those blissful images of family life, purged of all darkness, that we see in the advertisements.

Let me begin, in constructing this strange argument, with a paper published in the latest edition of Archives of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. It provides empirical support for the contention that children who watch more television eat more of the foods it advertises. “Each hour increase in television viewing,” it found, “was associated with an additional 167 kilocalories per day.” Most of these extra calories were contained in junk foods: fizzy drinks, crisps, biscuits, sweets, burgers and chicken nuggets. Watching television, the paper reported, “is also inversely associated with intake of fruit and vegetables”.

There is no longer any serious debate about what a TV diet does to your body. A British government survey published last month shows that the proportion of children in English secondary schools who are clinically obese has almost doubled in 10 years. Today, 27 per cent of girls and 24 per cent of boys between 11 and 15 years old suffer from this condition, which means they are far more likely to contract diabetes and to die before the age of 50.

But the more interesting question is what this diet might do to your mind. There are now scores of studies suggesting that it hurts the brain as much as it hurts the heart and the pancreas. Among the many proposed associations is a link between bad food and violent or antisocial behaviour.

The most spectacular results were those reported in the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine in 1997. The researchers had conducted a double-blind, controlled experiment in a jail for chronic offenders aged between 13 and 17. Many of the boys there were deficient in certain nutrients. They consumed, on average, only 63 per cent of the iron, 42 per cent of the magnesium, 39 per cent of the zinc, 39 per cent of the vitamin B12 and 34 per cent of the folate in the US government’s recommended daily allowance. The researchers treated half the inmates with capsules containing the missing nutrients, and half with placebos. They also counselled all the prisoners in the trial about improving their diets.

The number of violent incidents caused by inmates in the control group (those taking the placebos) fell by 56 per cent, and in the experimental group by 80 per cent. But among the inmates in the placebo group who refused to improve their diets, there was no reduction. The researchers also wired their subjects to an electroencephalograph to record brainwave patterns, and found a major decrease in abnormalities after 13 weeks on supplements.

A similar paper, published in 2002 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, found that among young adult prisoners given supplements of the vitamins, minerals and fatty acids in which they were deficient, disciplinary offences fell by 26 per cent in the experimental group, and not at all in the control group. Researchers in Finland found that all 68 of the violent offenders they tested during another study suffered from reactive hypoglycaemia: an abnormal tolerance of glucose caused by an excessive consumption of sugar, carbohydrates and stimulants such as caffeine.

In March this year the lead author of the 2002 report, Bernard Gesch, told the “Ecologist” magazine that “having a bad diet is now a better predictor of future violence than past violent behaviour ... Likewise, a diagnosis of psychopathy, generally perceived as being a better predictor than a criminal past, is still miles behind what you can predict just from looking at what a person eats.”

Why should a link between diet and behaviour be surprising? Quite aside from the physiological effects of eating too much sugar (apparent to anyone who has attended a children’s party), the brain, whose function depends on precise biochemical processes, can’t work properly with insufficient raw materials. The most important of these appear to be unsaturated fatty acids (especially the omega 3 types), zinc, magnesium, iron, folate and the B vitamins, which happen to be those in which the prisoners in the 1997 study were most deficient.

A report published at the end of last year by the pressure group “Sustain” explained what appear to be clear links between deteriorating diets and the growth of depression, behavioural problems, Alzheimer’s and other forms of mental illness. Sixty per cent of the dry weight of the brain is fat, which is “unique in the body for being predominantly composed of highly unsaturated fatty acids”. Zinc and magnesium affect both its metabolism of lipids and its production of neurotransmitters - the chemicals which permit the nerve cells to communicate with each other. The more junk you eat, the less room you have for foods which contain the chemicals the brain needs. This is not to suggest that food advertisers are solely responsible for the decline in the nutrients we consume. As Graham Harvey’s new book “We Want Real Food” shows, industrial farming, dependent on artificial fertilisers, has greatly reduced the mineral content of vegetables, while the quality of meat and milk has also declined. Nor do these findings suggest that a poor diet is the sole cause of crime and antisocial behaviour. But the studies I have read suggest that any government that claims to take crime seriously should start hitting the advertisers.

Instead, our government sits back while the television regulator, Ofcom, canoodles with the food industry. While drawing up its plans to control junk food adverts, Ofcom held 29 meetings with food producers and advertisers and just four with health and consumer groups. The results can be seen in the consultation document it published. It proposes to do nothing about adverts among programmes made for children over nine and nothing about the adverts the younger children watch most often. Which? reports that the most popular ITV programmes among two- to nine-year-olds are Dancing on Ice, Coronation Street and Emmerdale, but Ofcom plans to regulate only the programmes made specifically for the under-nines. It claims that tougher rules would cost the industry too much. To sustain the share values of the commercial broadcasters, Ofcom is prepared to sacrifice the physical and psychological wellbeing of our children.

At the European level, the collusion is even more obvious. Last week, Viviane Reding, the European media commissioner, spoke to a group of broadcasters about her plans to allow product placement in European TV programmes (this means that the advertisers would be allowed to promote their wares during, rather than just between, the programmes). She complained that her proposal had been attacked by the European parliament. “You have to fight if you want to keep it,” she told the TV executives. “I would like to make it very clear that I need your support in this.”

I spent much of last week trying to discover whether the Home Office is taking the research into the links between diet and crime seriously. In the past, it has insisted that further studies are needed, while failing to fund them. First my request was met with incredulity, then I was stonewalled. Tough on crime. To hell with the causes of crime. —Dawn/Guardian Service

Rescuing Doha round

SUNDAY was supposed to be the deadline for a breakthrough in the Doha round of global trade talks. But since setting this target at their Hong Kong meeting in December, trade ministers have made virtually no progress, and they seem ready to give up.

That would be an awful error. A trade deal would secure important gains, and the negotiating obstacles are surmountable. A successful Doha round would contribute to the struggle against poverty. Negotiators have agreed to scrap nearly all the barriers faced by exporters from at least 32 of the world’s poorest nations and to eliminate the export subsidies that help farmers from rich countries compete unfairly against poor ones.

These concessions, along with the faster global growth generated by cuts in barriers faced by rich and middle-income countries, would lift perhaps 10 million people above the $2-a-day income line over the next decade, judging from scenarios constructed by the World Bank. Meanwhile, rich countries would gain also: from expanded opportunities for exporters; from cheaper imports for consumers; and (in the US case) from the obligation to trim trade-distorting farm subsidies that damage the environment and waste taxpayer dollars.

The chief obstacle to a deal is the European Union, driven by countries with highly protected small farmers — Ireland, Poland and, above all, France. Last year the Bush administration proposed cuts in farm subsidies that, even after stripping out accounting tricks, amounted to a genuine concession. It was then up to the European Union to reciprocate, but removing such tricks from its proposal left virtually nothing of substance.

When negotiators tried to shift the Europeans at the Hong Kong meeting, French President Jacques Chirac personally called officials to ensure that progress would be blocked.

Since then France has become even more of a problem. Mr Chirac’s government recently withdrew, in the face of student protests, a modest reform of labour law.—The Washington Post