Subsequent to that work I retained my interest in Pakistan in various capacities, serving as a consultant for the Agency for International Development, the Development Advisory Service of Harvard University and most recently the Word Bank.
In order to dispel any suspicion that I am biased in the current conflict between East and West Pakistan. I should mention that virtually a my entire association with that country has been concentrated on the problems and development of West Pakistan. When I have occasion to criticize the policies that foster the economics of West Pakistan to the neglect of the problems of the East, I am criticizing myself among others. was a party, a small party, to those policies. My attitude was typical of many others.
As an economist, I can speak to really only about the economic aspects of the current crisis. But the economic aspects arc peculiarly important, as is indicated by the fact that there of the six points in the program of the Awami League, which won a 10 to 1 majority in the recent elections in East Pakistan-half of their program as I said, is devoted to economic and fiscal reforms. The current crisis, then, is largely economic in its genesis. economic in its objectives, and its resolution too will depend largely on economic factors. I should like to address my remarks first to the economic circumstances that lie behind the uprising and then to the economic factors that will determine its outcome. These latter factors are of a, special concern to this subcommittee because, unfortunately, they imply that the attitude and actions of the United States will have a significant and perhaps decisive effect on the struggle. So our country has an inescapable though unwelcome responsibility in the matter. I believe also that our national interests are involved.
There are a few crucial facts I am anxious to put before you, mostly relating to the poverty of East Pakistan and to the problem of income disparity between East and West Pakistan. The poverty of East Pakistan is so appalling that may sound facetious. From an economic point of view East Pakistan is simply a mistake. There are more than 70 million people trying to wrest a living from about 22 million acres and very little else by way of natural recourses. That works out to about an acre and a half per farm family, which is approximately one half of 1 per cent of the average size of an American farm. On top of that they have the cyclones, the floods, and the droughts.
Last year's cyclone which killed at least 300.000 people and devastated hundreds of thousands of acres was only an especially bad instance of a periodic catastrophe. The floods are not as lethal, but are more crippling economically. In each annual monsoon, approximately one-third the land area of East Pakistan is inundated and its crops lost or severely damaged. Between the monsoons, in much of the land there is not enough rain to grow crops without irrigation, for which facilities are lacking. Farm yields and incomes are as low as this recital of difficulties would lead you to expect, and this is particularly grim in a country where about 60 per cent of all income is derived from farming. The result is a per capita income of not much more than $45 a year which is a figure so far below our experience that it is meaningless.
West Pakistan is poor also. Per capita income there is about S 75 a year, but low as that is, it is at least 60 per cent higher than per capita income in the east. This great gap between tile levels of income in the two parts of the country or better, the degrees of poverty-is one
