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There are enough resources on earth to feed everybody sufficiently.
According to a recent report entitled "World Hunger: Twelve Myths"
prepared by the California based Institute for Food and Development
Policy, there is food in abundance in the world, so much so that
in the developing world, 78 percent of all malnourished children
aged under five live in countries with food surpluses. The problem
is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food.
The report says, "The true source of world hunger is not scarcity
but policy, not inevitability but politics. The real culprits
are the economies that fail to offer everyone opportunities"
Never was the need for a new global economic thought more pronounced
than it is today. Repeated failures of contemporary economics,
sometimes manifested as Latin American economic crises, sometimes
appearing in the guise of South East Asian economic crises and
very recently, reaching the beginning of its climax in the form
of very self-evident global economic crises, have themselves made
it imperative that all thinking and feeling individuals question
its very bases and norms. In the west itself, as evident from
the quote above, voices are being raised from many quarters against
the flaws in the economic and financial system.
Economics is not a natural science, where the laws of nature
are fixed and unavoidable. Whether a person is a Muslim or a non-Muslim,
he has to obey the laws of nature if he wants to use the forces
of nature to his advantage and avoid destruction. For example,
unless we follow the law of gravitation, we cannot send a rocket
into the space. Different points of view do not matter in the
realm of natural science. The laws of natural science are determined
by Allah Himself and not by man. Man has no choice but to discover
them and mould his actions according to their implications.
Such is not the case with economics. Economics is a social science,
not a natural science. A discipline of social science has always
room for change and improvement and it can incorporate the diverse
views of different schools of thought. The modern economic system
has evolved over the centuries, but still that is not a guarantee
that what we presently have is the only and the best form of economic
system possible. Unfortunately, even the developing countries,
which are suffering the most at the hands of the present economic
system, have rarely questioned many of its norms, which run contrary
to common sense.
The West has tried its hand at economics. The result is immense
poverty amid affluence, not only in the poor countries, but also
in the developed Western nations. Now it is the responsibility
of the Muslims to contribute to a discipline on which their influence
has largely remained dormant, with the obvious exceptions of a
handful of individuals who have worked zealously to keep the discipline
of Islamic economics alive.
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