After Years of Marking Time, Environment Gets Top-Level Attention

by Richard H. Curtiss

“Chairman of the Environment Protection Council Asif Ali Zardari briefed the prime minister about the crash afforestation program that the Ministry of Environment has undertaken. He pointed out that Pakistan has one of the lowest tree covers in this region…Asif Ali Zardari further briefed the prime minister about efforts to create mass awareness about environmental issues and sustainable development. He particularly referred to the campaign launched to associate the student community with environmental protection activities.”

Associated Press of Pakistan news item, July 1995.

For foreign readers, the news item quoted above conjures up a picture of a busy prime minister stealing a glance at the clock and wondering when this tiresome bureaucrat will finish his plea for funding of his ministry’s pet programs and leave empty-handed. Pakistani readers know better.

The prime minister being briefed was Pakistan’s dynamic Benazir Bhutto. The chairman of the Environment Protection Council doing the briefing was her husband, a land-owning gentleman farmer who really does love the outdoors and growing things and who has thrown himself enthusiastically into his dual role as Pakistan’s minister of Environment, Urban Affairs, Forestry and Wildlife, and chairman of Pakistan’s Environmental Protection Council (EPC).

His ambitious plans range from persuading every Pakistani man, woman and child, all 130 million of them, to plant a minimum of three trees twice a year (with the government providing the seedlings), to making environmental studies a mandatory course in primary and secondary schools. Under the circumstances, Pakistani readers rightly concluded, it was unlikely that Pakistan’s environmental programs would remain underfunded much longer.

Nor does Asif Ali Zardari need to explain the urgency of environmental protection in Pakistan to his wife, the prime minister. For a brief time she was his predecessor as EPC chairman, and during that period she made some contributions of her own to what subsequently has become her husband’s action plan. In fact, the council, which originally was envisioned as a deliberative body composed of key ministers and their top deputies, existed for 10 years, from 1983 to 1993, under the chairmanship of the president of Pakistan. However, during that turbulent decade in Pakistani politics not a single meeting was ever convened. When Benazir Bhutto began her current term as prime minister, therefore, she assumed the role of chairman. At the council’s first-ever meeting she proposed that it be put under the chairmanship of a respected person who would have the time and dedication to give Pakistan’s environment the attention it deserves. That person turned out to be her husband, Asif Ali Zardari.

In the fewer than three years he has filled the position, Zardari has personally chaired six meetings, the most recent in May 1996, with the purpose of incorporating as many elements as possible of Pakistan’s public and private sectors into the country’s environmental programs. As a result, he now is making bold predictions of what the council and his ministry will have accomplished by the time the current term of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government headed by his wife is completed in 1998.

He now is concentrating on specific projects to implement Pakistan’s National Conservation Strategy, originally devised for presentation at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Pakistan’s plan was praised by specialists at the conference and was followed by a National Conservation Action plan in January 1993. It is available in popular form as a 75-page illustrated publication focusing on 14 areas and entitled Where We Are, Where We Should Be, and How to Get There. It is designed to catch the attention of Pakistan’s younger generation.

Since assuming the council chairmanship in September 1994, Zardari has met with some 2,000 heads of companies operating in Pakistan and has identified four priority areas for environmental protection. The first priority is afforestation, to redress one of Pakistan’s major national problems. Because wood has been a traditional source of fuel for the rapidly growing population, less than 5 percent of the country remains under tree cover.

According to Muhammad Zafarullah Khan, a scientist in Pakistan’s civil service who has been assigned to the Ministry of Environment, Urban Affairs, Forestry and Wildlife, the environmental council has set a goal of doubling the country’s tree cover by the turn of the century. “To do so, the chairman has sought the help of all and sundry—private industry, the government, non-governmental organizations, girl guides and boy scouts,” Khan says. “Any organized educational institution that sets up an environmental program will be given tree saplings, and in the process will provide education about the needs and value of trees.”

Production of the saplings themselves has been commissioned by the Pakistani government at a cost of one Pakistani rupee (about three cents) per tree, and small areas set aside for their growth can be seen by casual visitors on farms all over the country.

“Every individual in Pakistan should plant at least three trees a year in the spring and again in the fall growing seasons,” Khan explains. “That can meet the target of doubling the land planted with trees.”

With a scientist’s precision, he says that at 500 trees per acre, the program should produce at least 8 million more acres of trees over a six- or seven-year period. Further, he explains, “This afforestation campaign is the vehicle to create awareness not only about trees but about the environment as a whole. It is a colossal activity affecting everyone’s life.”

The Environmental Council’s second priority is waste management in cities. “No drop of water should be allowed to pollute rivers or other water resources,” Khan explains. “Nothing must be released without being treated to at least make it environmentally neutral. It’s a tall order and it requires an immense amount of equipment.”

Khan says water treatment requirements, based on internationally accepted standards, were published in 1993 and the country’s industries were given a three-year grace period to bring themselves into compliance. “For most of the grace period neither municipalities nor industries took any notice, 4" he says. “Now, with great effort, the council has been able to insist that there will be no delays.

Chairman Zardari has been able to meet with municipal councils, chambers of commerce and other groups. Khan reported that “Talking to them, we are adopting a common-sense approach. Initially we are not holding them to the letter of the law, nor are we allowing them to ignore the law. The message is that we’re not asking for the moon. But we are asking for basic norms in conforming to at least minimum standards.

“If you add up all the lost hours and slowed productivity due to illness, you realize the importance of this program. Most of our medical problems are because of water-borne disease. If business and industry can improve the quality of the water their workers and their families drink, they can improve productivity. If we minimize waste both at the input and the output stage, the message is that industries can produce more and at the same time be environmentally conscious.”

Khan credits international organizations for their assistance with such programs. “We’ve received a lot of help from the World Bank and also from the Canadian government,” he pointed out. He said that experts from abroad have helped Pakistan deal with specialized aspects of its environmental program such as medical wastes from hospitals, which can be a dangerous source of pollution.

“We also are holding the public sector to environmental standards,” he continued. “We are looking at innovative ways of financing what is needed by both the public and the private sector. Eventually we expect to privatize all aspects of waste management, from trash collection to recycling.”

The Environmental Protection Council’s third major priority focuses on urban air quality, Khan said. “Vehicular emissions are the number one factor in polluting air quality in our cities.”

The effort begins with reducing the sulfur content in fuels, improving Pakistan’s refineries, and providing vehicle owners with a choice at the pump of more efficient fuels and also alternative fuels like natural gas. The government also is working on making it possible for service stations to have the equipment needed to provide automobile diagnostic services.

“We want motorists to be able to come in and have their engines tested and tuned and see for themselves the resulting improvement in engine effectiveness,” Khan explains. “We are campaigning to educate drivers about properly tuned engines, and also about noise levels.”

The Council also is spearheading the introduction of unleaded gasoline based on research into the extremely harmful effects on children of lead in the environment. Khan cited work being done on setting noise standards for vehicles and praised the Environmental Protection Agency of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, which, he said, is working with the local police and “has had a major impact on noise standards working with drivers of motorized rickshaws.”

A fourth Environmental Council priority is the direct result of an initiative by Prime Minister Bhutto. She expressed concern about the widespread use of shopping bags made of black plastic which, Khan said, “is the absolute end product of plastic recycling.” The Council advocates substituting bio-degradable plastic bags for the black plastic bags which, when not properly discarded, litter rural areas—smothering and killing any plant life under them.

In all of the Council’s efforts “the message is that government cannot be expected to bring about change alone.” Khan says. “It has to be a common effort. Every person has to be conscious of the impact of the environment on the quality of his life and the lives of his children.”

Unique problems facing Pakistani environmental efforts, Khan said, are the country’s “exploding population, low educational standards, continuing illiteracy in many areas, and large barren areas separating population centers. Under such circumstances radio is a vital tool in reaching otherwise inaccessible segments of the population, particularly women in rural areas.”

On a national level, Khan said, “55 percent of our population is concentrated along the rivers. This creates drainage problems that can only be relieved by building a drainage system on each side of the Indus River, taking the drainage to the sea. However, that drainage has to be treated to avoid marine pollution.”

A marine pollution control board now is studying that problem.“It all requires money, expertise and time,” Khan acknowledges. “But it is vital to create an attractive environment for the kind of investment needed to create jobs.”

Khan, a physicist with 30 years of government service, was a counselor in the Pakistani embassy in Washington, DC from 1979 to 1987, dealing with U.S. PL 480 programs before the cutoff of most U.S. foreign aid to Pakistan. In the course of his embassy service, and frequent subsequent visits to the United States, where he has a daughter and a son enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley and Georgetown University in Washington, DC, he has encountered many Pakistani expatriates ready to return home under the right conditions.

He is convinced that the work of Pakistan’s Environmental Protection Council is playing an important role in creating an environment that can reverse the brain drain. This, he believes, could bring back to Pakistan many of its highly trained men and women who, with their technical and entrepreneural skills and with their venture capital, could raise the country’s own technical and scientific standards, create badly needed jobs, and speed the country’s development. Eventually this might even reverse the current need for many of Pakistan’s best and brightest sons and daughters to spend the most productive years of their lives abroad serving the development needs of other countries.