The New Nation - Internet Edition

Economic diplomacy below mark

FAILURE to achieve targets of export by our diplomatic missions abroad has been reported in the media. Ironically, the missions that failed to achieve targets are those which are based in countries where traditionally big markets for Bangladeshi goods exist. Some of these missions are in Washington, Rome, the Hague, Bangkok, Manila, Ottowa, Cairo and Brunei. Our diplomatic relations, in general, with the countries where the above missions are based, are good. Despite that lagging behind in export target achievement does not sound good.

The unimpressive and below target performance has been noted in respect of seven commercial wings of Bangladesh missions abroad. Their sole purpose is to promote and popularise Bangladeshi products in countries where they are located. The commercial wings that have performed poorly are those in Berlin, London, Brussels, Madrid, Beijing, New Delhi and Kuala Lumpur. Their poor performance, in turn, would also affect the performance of the export sector. But given the enthusiasm and efficient conduct of activities, the foreign missions can help establish contacts between local and foreign businessmen to facilitate exports from the country.

The below target performance in export trade is, to some extent, blamed on poor diplomatic service. Our diplomats are generally smart in dress. This is not bad but the worse thing is that they do not assume such a disposition for easy sailing of their diplomatic functions of which economic diplomacy now forms an important part. Sadly, thus our diplomats have often not succeeded to perform as superior servants of the republic operating in foreign countries for boosting national image and promoting business. It is high time that such failures are plugged in so that the mission abroad record much better performance on the economic front.

The proposed halal food fair

MALAYSIA will hold a week-long exhibition on 'halal' products in Dhaka in July next as the brotherly country finds a 'huge prospect' for the business in Bangladesh. Malaysian deputy secretary general of the ministry of entrepreneur and cooperative said this during his recent visit to Dhaka and spelt out the exhibition plan. In this regard, he said Malaysia is promoting food business in Muslim and non-Muslim countries across the world as halal foods are hygienic and clean from both religious and material points of view. Malaysia and Bangladesh can go ahead together for further promoting the business of halal food worldwide. The visitor from Kuala Lumpur said his country wants to work with Bangladesh as Malaysia has a plan to set up joint venture plants here and produce halal products for export to the global market.

Three Malaysian and two Bangladeshi firms have already signed memorandum of understanding to launch the business under joint venture for halal food production and marketing. There is a US$ 2.1 trillion global market for halal food, which is 12 per cent of the global US$ 2.1 trillion agro-food products. The halal food trade was estimated at US $ 580 billion a year ago. 'The Halal Industry Development Corporation' was set up by the Malaysian Government with a view to meeting the growing demand of halal products at home and abroad. Malaysia's ambition of becoming a world halal hub has already been fulfilled. More consumers are purchasing halal food because it is 'healthy food option which is being monitored and audited in a way than other food is not. To set up a halal food industry, it needs halal certification that exists in Malaysia, which through undertaking joint ventures can help Bangladesh diversify its export basket by producing halal food products effectively in the highly competitive world today.

Memory of two of my late superior officers

Shah Abdul Hannan

Recently, two doyens of Bangladesh civil service died, one of them was M. Nurul Islam, former secretary and former governor of Bangladesh Bank and the other was M Mahbubuzzaman , former cabinet secretary and Minister .

I worked with both of them and I have fond memories. Mr. Nurul Islam became first chairman of National Board of Revenue and I joined as its first second secretary in the customs and the then excise side. There was no member for only customs side and also no first secretary .I had to deal with the Chairman almost direct. I had heard about him before but I did not work with him. He was Chairman for a short time and he handed over charge after some time to Mr. Kafiluddin Mahmud, an officer of his batch. They were among the officers of first or second batch of the then Pakistan Civil Service. I found Mr Islam a totally professional, competent and soft-spoken officer. He would not talk much but he was the epitome of a gentlemen. I remember that it was decided to reduce duty on machinery from 30 percent to eighteen percent because of devaluation made of taka to dollar. He asked me to draft a new notification with a new schedule. I then suggested to him that this exercise was not necessary and that the figure 30 percent in the earlier notification can be replaced by 18 percent, it would do. He thought for a moment and then agreed with me and asked me to do that way.

On another occasion in 1974 probably, he was commerce secretary, Late Kazi Mosharraf Hossain was the Chairman of the NBR and I was the first secretary. It was decided by the government to raise more revenue and Mr. Nurul Islam suggested imposition of a development surcharge which was very easy to do and practical but Kazi Musharraf was not agreeable. He said that an import sur-charge should be imposed. Mosharraf sahib was a tough arguer and Nurul Islam sahib could not convince him. Finally Mr. Nurul Islam did agree to an amendment of Import and Export law and a new import license tax was imposed. This shows a kind of bureaucratic power-mongering which I saw throughout my service life .On the other hand I found Nurul Islam sahib very different and very understanding.

My last direct experience with him was in 1986 or 87 when as a D.G. of the Bureau of Anti-corruption I was investigating an alleged graft case of one hundred thousand dollar against an officer who later became Minister. The then President wanted to see the file because somebody close to him reported the matter to him. After meeting with the President I met Nurul islam sahib on his advice. Mr Nurul Islam took certain papers from me but told me very politely that there was no hope for the investigation. He was only telling me practical aspects of such cases, the realities but also false allegations that are galore in our country to defame and destroy others.

Mr Mahbubuzzaman was another great soul He was probably from 1954 batch of civil service. I found him as Cabinet secretary and Cabinet Division used to supervise the work of Bureau of Anti-Corruption. I have found hardly such well-behaved, knowledgeable, competent and courageous officer. His example would be rare like Nurul Islam sahib. He used to preside over the Anti-Corruption council of that time where prosecution decision about important cases of corruption used to be taken.

I was myself not very prosecution minded because I had very grave doubts about the complaints and investigating officers and I used to take very few cases there. I found him more considerate in giving clearance for prosecution .He backed me very much during my days in that organisation and did help me somewhat when I was being challenged by a junior officer of civil service cadre in the Bureau. I was facing a difficult time in my life at that time but I decided to pass this crisis coolly with patience as Almighty Allah has taught humanity. Mr Zaman knew the matter and used to console me though he did not take any further action at that time. Service solidarity in this country is more important than truth and justice. It is only a few who can pass this test.

I faced the same situation when my promotion as secretary became due to me .I was by passed by thirty officers though my record as the key person who introduced VAT in this country and also my record in major reform in the Banking sector was well-known. I wish justice become the guiding principle in our life.

Mr Mahbubuzzaman used to tell everybody and also me 'Apni' (you in respectful sense) and he had great affection for me. He did visit me several times after his retirement and I always tried to help him whenever it was possible.

Mr Islam and Mr Mahbubuzzaman have gone from us almost silently with no publicity or discussion to mention. I feel a little pained that such great sons who have built the administration in Bangladesh have gone in this manner. I pray for them, Allah may reward them for all their good works for the nation.

(The writer is former secretary, Government of Bangladesh)

Arrest price hike, curb inflation

Maswood Alam Khan

Colleagues in my office of late have been wasting a considerable period of time speculating and gossiping about probable percentage of their present basic pays that the government may offer as dearness allowance for their chasing the present galloping prices of daily necessities.

A few, for a dare, expects 25%, but the majority dare not breathe a hope of more than 10%. They seemed not so much frustrated with price hikes as they are bracing themselves against their ongoing hardships in expectation of an imminent comforter, a pay-raise---the way a Muslim while fasting during Ramadan waits out the afternoon in expectation of a delicious 'iftaar' (evening breakfast).

What really perturbed me and at the same time evoked my distant memories on 'money and banking', I learned about 30 years back, was a fancy Halim, my peon-cum-cook, conjured from his pay and perks---a wish of something corporeal, something more tangible than the paper currency notes he draws from his bank account.

Halim said: "Sir, I heard that all Army and Police personnel get food items at heavily subsidized price in addition to their higher pay and perks compared to ours. If the government cannot really afford the same facilities for the rest of the public servants, can't we at least be offered rice grains, instead of paper currencies, as money for our pay and perks?"

Such a fancy by a lowly employee does not augur well for the confidence of people in paper currency notes issued by the government: an ominous signature that brings back to our minds horrid memories of early thirties of the last century when money and prices followed each other upward in an ever-accelerating spiral and people got frantic to get rid of ephemeral paper money in favour of buying anything substantial: a behaviour what in Germany during 1923 hyperinflation was known as 'flight into real values'.

During my long career as a banker I met two categories of clients: savers and borrowers. Whenever I met a saver I used to tell him a bunch of lies on the benefit of savings though my heart bled at his future plights to be inflicted by my bank and whenever I met a borrower, especially one who always sniffed at ways of getting interests accrued on his loan account waived, I had to hear from him a larger bunch of blatant lies though my blood boiled at his mischievous ways of swindling funds out of my bank.

You don't need to be an economist with a doctoral degree on monetary science to understand that in an inflationary economy when your paper money is not redeemable against a predetermined quantity of anything precious like gold or bronze or if your savings is not shielded by any insurance guaranteed against inflation a saver who religiously deposits his money in a bank account is a born loser and a borrower who thrives on bank's money is a born gainer.

Except for a very few genuine entrepreneurs who are usually young and dynamic most of the new applicants for bank loans, as I found, were old, impish, shrewd and conceited persons having no entrepreneurial background. Under tutelage of some muscled guardians one such loan seeker looks for a pliable banker to milk loan from a bank with a view to diverting maximum fund from the bank-financed project. At the very moment of filling out his loan application form he knows he would somehow turn the industry into a sick one in near future and ask for waiver of both principal and interest by the coercive forces of the regime in power he would befriend.

Even if he would have paid interest in full on his borrowed money, say at the rate of 12%, he had in fact to bear the real cost of the borrowed fund at the rate of only 2%, if inflation was 10%. The borrowed fund would be a bonanza fallen from thin air with some extra earnings, if inflation reached 12% or more.

If you are a pauper you may turn out to be a multibillionaire in a matter of ten years in Bangladesh if you know the arts of excellent public relations, hoodwinking a banker into giving loan to your phoney but shiny project backed by a third party collateral and then diverting funds in collusion with some high-ups to invest in some real estate titled under names of your blood relations.

Just wait for only a year or two. Now employ a consultant with proven expertise to prepare a shiny paper seeking cent percent waiver of interest, part waiver of the principal loan and complete blocking of the residual of the principal to be adjusted at easy and multiple instalments on a long time scale.

You are now a CIP (Commercially Important Person) with a shiny bald head, an impeccably manicured moustache and a few creases on your forehead. And people are eager to hear in late night TV talk-shows your wise words on how to arrest price rise and curb inflation.

After ten years the real estate you bought for Taka 20 lakh with fund fleeced from the bank loan will now sell at Taka 6 crore and the instalment of the interest-free blocked principal is now perhaps a small amount, as petite an amount as needed to buy not more than a few bottles of wine---thanks to appreciation of real estate and depreciation of money by the whooping rates of inflation for years fuelled by such scams.

Instead of achieving mass production accompanied by mass consumption providing men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by a nation's economic machinery to ensure equitable distribution of wealth, a giant suction pump thus draws into a few hands an increasing portion of wealth. This serves them as capital accumulations. But by not generating employments through injecting their ill-gotten accumulated capitals into manufacturing plants or service industries these wealth grabbers stand in the way for an economy to flourish and instead pave the way to all the ills like price hikes and hyperinflation: an end result that has enticed Halim, my peon-cum-cook, to demand money in the form of rice grains.

A weird idea cropped up inside my head after hearing Halim's suggestion on introducing rice grains as units of money. Halim could not help bursting into peals of laughter as I ordered him to carry to a goldsmith in the nearby New Market in Khulna a few pinches of 'miniket' rice he usually buys me for Taka 45 a kilogram.

A very loyal employee Halim without any protest abided by my order and the goldsmith on my telephonic request used his fully automated electronic 'gold balance'---equipped with readability and weighing capacity of a range from 0.01 grams to 4100 grams---to weigh exactly five grams of 'miniket' rice grains Halim carried. Then I asked Halim to count all the grains weighed 5 grams. Result: exactly 331 grains, which translates into 14 grains for Paisa 1 on the price basis of Taka 45 a kilogram of rice.

During my training as a Probationary Officer in Agrani Bank decades back I came to learn that banking as a profession was developed out of a forgery committed by goldsmiths. Goldsmiths were safe-keepers of gold coins and other valuables of citizens, the first bankers who temporarily lent gold coins to the needy for interest without the consent of the depositors---the exact job modern bankers do now by taking deposits from savers and lending a part of the same to the needy, assuming all the depositors would not crowd their shops all at a time to redeem their paper receipts against paper money.

More interestingly, goldsmiths were the first bankers who introduced paper money when goldsmith's warehouse receipts were negotiated by bearers as a surrogate for gold money itself.

Like monkeys and birds humans too were born on this earth with their birthright on shelter and food, the basic physiological requirements according to Maslow's theory on hierarchy of needs. All animals---more or less rational---were happy and hearty with food, drink and abodes galore. Problems arose when we humans declared ourselves as the fittest and started devouring other living beings in quest for our creature comforts necessitating tools and instruments for faster exploitation of natural resources. We humans are the first animals who needed to exchange goods and services.

Before coinage, every person bartered something he needed less for a product he needed more and resultantly a voluntary market economy became a latticework of mutually beneficial exchanges. If an egg dealer wanted to buy a pair of shoes, he had to find a shoemaker who wanted, at that very moment, to buy eggs---a manageable job though at times was proven difficult. But, problems arose when a teacher of mathematics found it difficult to barter lessons on arithmetic to an illiterate grocer for buying groceries or when a home owner could not divide his house into small pieces to barter a splint to a dairyman for buying milk. This crucial element in barter is what economists call the 'double coincidence of wants' and the second problem is one of 'indivisibilities'.

But man is ingenious. He managed to find a way to overcome these obstacles and transcend the limiting system of barter and arrived at one of man's most important, revolutionary and productive inventions: money. Money was a leap forward in the history of civilization and in man's economic progress---though a progress whether in reality emancipated or in fact enslaved humanity is a million dollar question that can be perused and answered only by other animals on this planet or elsewhere in the universe who are still living with complete freedom, with no money in their possessions.

Through the centuries, many commodities have been selected as money on the market. Fish on the Atlantic seacoast of colonial North America, beaver in the old Northwest, and tobacco in the Southern colonies were chosen as money. In other cultures, salt, sugar, cattle, iron hoes, tea, cowrie shells, and many other commodities have been chosen as cash on the market.

Even cigarettes inside prisons and maybe rice grains, as fancied by Halim, and jute were money in ancient Bengal. After trials and errors all countries and all civilizations at last found gold and silver as the best commodities for money from all the points of value, durability, divisibility and portability.

Life was serene and prices were more or less stable depending on demand and supply of purchasable commodities in markets as long as coins made of precious metals were redeemable on demand from the issuer. Inflation was not at all heard of. Problems arose and a hue and cry was raised due to inflation and concomitant price hikes when paper and printing machines were invented and paper money completely replaced gold coins as legal money.

Kings and queens and later all the governments under the sun have been enjoying monopoly control of the supply of money, a control which will perhaps never be denationalized however free economy a democracy espouses, though there is no good reason why a private institution should not produce a more reliable money backed by gold or a basket of commodities. The only factor standing in the way of such honest money is the power of the state, a power that the state is most reluctant to yield.

Kings and governments have used this monopoly position to circulate paper money as a means of control and sometimes as a manipulative instrument to meet mysterious agendas and unavoidable expenses, sparking a new phenomenon known as inflation.

The paper that is issued as money has no intrinsic value beyond the paper upon which it is printed. In the past the paper could be exchanged for prefixed amount of gold or other substantial assets-but monetary monopoly of almost all the governments of the world has stopped that redemption of paper money. No wonder Halim has preferred rice grains to paper as a medium of his money.

Who knows time is not far away when civilization would have to encroach upon all the forests and jungles to build roads, highways and multi-storeyed buildings leaving no space for cultivation of any organic or inorganic food we are now accustomed with! With all precious metals completely exhausted from mines, invention of capsulated synthetic food, surgical modification of our stomachs for consuming minuscule pallets of plastic food and absence of any commodity scarcer and more precious than rice grains produced on limited chunks of government-controlled lands central banks of many governments of the world would probably find monetization of their money on rice grain standard more viable than on gold grain standard.

Opinion: Employment in Saudi Arab

Professor M Zahidul Haque

KSA seems to becoming another USA - atleast in visa matters! On March 26,2008 I was terribly shocked to learn from a Press report that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia(KSA) will no longer recruit Bangladeshi workers in the housing and agriculture sectors. Saudi Arabian Labour Minister Gazi Al-Gosabi reportedly said-"The decision was taken in view of the fact that the quota fixed for Bangladeshi workers in the Kingdom was over". Good! Is this quota is like those of the US DV quotas?!

In reality, by hiring Bangladeshi workers, the KSA is not only solving unemployment problem but helping their muslim Bangladeshi brothers led a better and honest life. Since Allah has given wealth to KSA, it becomes their religious and moral obligation to help the muslims of the world who have less wealth. And the Bangladeshi and other workers are earning through selling their hard labor. Of course if a Bangladeshi worker breaks law or undermines his own status, he deserves to be punished as per law. The Bangladesh govt. should also take legal action against such an offender. What I heard is, language is the problem. Since most Bangladeshi workers are less literate, in most cases they fail to follow Arabic and English. I think, this problem can easily be overcomed if Saudi Government can set up Arabic Language Teaching Centres in some major cities of Bangladesh including capital Dhaka. This Arabic Language Teaching Centres can also provide some elementary instructions on communicative English.If we look at the English speaking countries like the United Kingdom, the British Council has set up English Language Teaching Centre for helping Bangladeshis learn English before leaving for the UK on account of education,job, or other purposes.At the same time, the KSA authorities should also take appropriate measures to let their general employees engaged in public service learn English and other international languages.

We in Bangladesh greatly admire the Saudi King and his kingdom.Royal Highness Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud is the custodian of two holy mosques. In a time when some vested quarters are trying to undermine Islamic culture, norms and values, the Saudi King has a great responsibility of guiding the entire muslim world through his prudence and leadership. Islam is a religion of peace and the muslims are very much conscious about leading their life by differentiating between what is 'right' and what is 'wrong' as per the instructions of the holy Quran. A muslim in his right path cannot hurt anyone's feelings, be he muslim or non-muslim.

By providing employment to Bangladeshi and other muslims, the KSA is helping and encouraging muslims to live on 'Halal'(legitimate) income. Meanwhile it is unfortunate that although Bangladesh has a huge number of highly qualified and skilled professionals, the KSA is less interested to hire Bangladeshis for higher jobs. What I strongly believe, if KSA asks to participate in their nation building works, many Bangladeshis including this writer will move, no matter whether in employment or just as muslim brothers to help their Saudi muslim brothers.

What I feel and many other will approve that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia should emerge as one of the super powers of the world rich in knowledge and scientific excellence! But to accomplish this goal, the King need to come closer to the people, muslims in particular and others in general. The king's palace and all the royals need to take active part in literacy enhancement as well as ensuring common Saudis' access to education as per the demand of the time.

[Prof. M Zahidul Haque is Chairman, Department of Agricultural Extension & Information System, Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University,Dhaka]