 I recently gave a talk on the economic crisis in Pakistan and solutions from an Islamic perspective. This has attracted a lot of interest and I am re-recording the talk in English but broken up into parts and this is the first part of this English talk. So the first point I want to make is that the problem is easy to understand and the solution is easy to understand but it is very difficult to implement. Vice Chancellor of Pied for five years, Pied is the official government think tank and the job of this think tank is to provide advice to the government. And we have provided advice to ministries and bureaucrats and ministers on a wide range of different topics. But no one ever listened to our advice which was based on research and would have led to very good results if implemented. Now the conclusion from this experience is that it is not a very useful idea to take a list of economic policies and advise the government to follow them because they are not going to do it. So it leads to a deeper question why doesn't the government follow good economic advice and if that is so then what can we do about it given that the government is not going to follow our advice. So we will address this deeper question of what to do when the government is not compliant later in this section of the talk I want to just explain what the problem is and what the solution is. But the key issue is an insight from Marx that the laborers are exploited by making them participate and believe in their own exploitation. Similarly colonized countries are exploited by colonizers by making them believe in the necessity of their own exploitation. A recent study showed that the colonized countries are paying about 2 trillion dollars to the rich countries, the former colonizers. So how does this system work where we are happily giving away vast amounts of money to the colonizers even though we are no longer colonized. And the solution comes from the fact that we have been forced and we have been educated to believe false economic theories. So before we turn to deeper issues let's just look at the very simple basic facts of the economic problem facing us. And the basic problem is simple our imports are worth 60 billion and our exports are only 30 billion. We are forced to borrow 30 billion and if we borrow then we follow economic policies which are dictated by the lender. And so we are not free to make our own policy. So in order to be able to implement any economic policy must get out of the debt trap. And how can we get out of the debt trap there are two possible ways either we should increase our exports or we decrease our imports. For decades our policy planners have been trying to increase exports without any success. But historically all over the world countries which have grown have done so by reducing their imports and by developing the capability to produce their own imports. And this is sort of obvious because unless we develop our own productive capacity we cannot make any progress. In technical terms the path to growth is import substitution rather than export promotion. Export promotion is a difficult job we must compete in the global market with lots of other countries for the market of the advanced and wealthy countries which requires a lot of technical skills. As opposed to this import substitution requires producing our own goods for our own domestic population and these goods because our population the masses are poor and uneducated. So these goods can be of very low quality and easy to produce and the market is also massive. So this is a strategy which has been successfully followed by many countries to achieve astonishing growth. So given that it's more or less obvious that import substitution is the right strategy instead of export promotion why do our policy makers insist on pursuing export promotion knowing that it has failed for decades and will continue to fail for decades. And the basic reason is very simple and is never mentioned in any textbook of economic theory. Basically when we export our raw materials we are selling our food and we are purchasing luxury products for the elites. So this is a policy which suits the upper class and is against the interest of the masses. So if we shift attention from export promotion to import substitution then the solution to the problem is obvious. Basically when we look at imports the vast majority come from agriculture products and energy. And for energy we have short term solutions. We have neighbors like Iran which are willing to sell us cheaply although this seems to be prohibited by the powers that be. But we can if we can overcome the political obstacle we can get energy cheaply from Iran. And also in agriculture sector our yields in the agriculture are the lowest in the region. So it should be very easily possible to improve these yields and become self-sufficient agriculturally. So if we are producing our own energy and agriculture products we won't need imports and we won't need to borrow and we will be not in the debt trap and we will be able to make independent economic policy. But this advice will not be welcomed by those who are in power in Pakistan and it will not be welcomed by the global wealth structure which wants Pakistan to stay dependent and colonized so that they can extract massive amounts of resources from Pakistan. So now we have to in the rest of the talk we will consider what we can do given that we do not have the power to implement policies that we would like in Pakistan today.