Re: Food prices up by 42% in one year
A letter from Dawn:
Foreign debt figures
"THROUGHOUT General Musharraf’s tenure there has been talk of ending foreign dictation with regard to the economy, the latest reference being in the budget speech when the minister of state for finance endorsed “sovereignty from external interference, domination and dictation” and “making the sovereignty of Pakistan absolute”.
The government has made various attempts to dress up the rising debt we owe to multinational institutions such as the World Bank, which interfere in every area of the economy as well as areas such as education. At times the figure for debt has been combined with external liability figures to hide it, as the adviser to the prime minister on finance, Dr Salman Shah, did on June 8. It has been expressed as a percentage relative to the GDP, to hide its absolute rise.
However, cutting through such smokescreens, debt to international financial institutions has grown immensely as a close scrutiny of State Bank figures reveals.
Before General Pervez Musharraf came into power, Pakistan’s debt to multinational institutions such as the World Bank stood at $10.599 billion (July 1, 1999). As of March 30, 2005 it had risen by 50 per cent to $15.461 billion. As for the debt to the IMF it now stands at $1.757 billion, a marginal reduction from the $1.825 billion it was before General Musharraf’s regime. This is in spite of the fact that over the same period we have paid $8.8 billion to multinational institutions.
So, rather than taking the nation into confidence about the true picture of increasing dictation by international financial institutions, we are having the wool pulled over our eyes. This is putting the interests of the western donor states first who back the World Bank and the IMF, to ensure the increased influence of western multinational companies and to prevent Pakistan from emerging as an industrial power."