| One usually associates milk with mothers rather than with Mother Nature, whose fecundity is traditionally symbolised by seasonal crop harvests and orchard boughs sagging with fruitful plenty. Milk, equally a product of nature, comes in such trickling quantities though and too often in the day for it to be treated with equal seriousness. This explains perhaps why those who have been associated with the planning of our economy over the past fifty years have tended to overlook its significance and have treated it, at best, as a by-product instead of the prime product that it is, and should be. In neglecting it, they have been in danger of depriving future Pakistanis of their birth-right, for if the provision of pure wholesome milk is good for every child, it is no less important for the health of any nation. Was it not Sir Winston Churchill - that most cherubic-looking of British Prime Ministers - who advised that `there is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies’? |
| Have we been making such an investment in our own community over the years, or has that investment been so imperceptibly fine that it has slipped unnoticed through the cracks in our economy? |
Published in DAWN 16 May 1998, and reprinted in THE BARK OF A PEN (2001). |
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