While urbanisation is occurring fast, rural areas still provide residence and work opportunities to most people in developing countries, including Pakistan. The problem of poverty is also particularly acute in rural areas themselves, with estimates placing three-fourths of poor people in the world to be living in villages.
The need for access to land thus remains a key factor not only in the fight against rural poverty but for improving the typical range of development problems, including the need for economic and social empowerment of vast segments of the world’s deprived population.
Simultaneous attempts by international agencies like the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank to integrate countries of the world into a global production system have not brought good news for the rural poor, either. While rich countries continue to resist pressure to stop giving subsidies to their farmers, many developing countries have been compelled in exchange for concessional aid packages to open up their agricultural markets to imported grains and to multinational agribusiness concerns.
A convergence has taken hold between the interests of large landowners and donor-supported models for agricultural development which goes back to the days of the Green Revolution. It was in the late 1960s when governments of developing countries began providing middle and rich farmers generous subsidies to boost productivity by the increased reliance on fertilisers and pesticides and mechanisation of farming. This is when increased costs of inputs and use of capital-intensive farming began pushing landless sharecroppers off the lands they were cultivating in favour of contract or lease-based farming.
Now, the new emphasis is to allow agribusinesses to take over large tracts of land and grow crops using economies of scale. Entities like the World Bank consider agribusiness an effective way to increase productivity. But the rural poor lack the resources required for capital-intensive agricultural production, which also does not offer them viable means to ensure better livelihoods.
The erosion of small-scale agriculture is thus continuing rapidly in many poorer countries around the world. Asia alone is home to 75 per cent of the world’s farming households, a vast majority of whom are either very small farmers or else landless.
Yet, instead of supporting small farmers and trying to provide land ownership opportunities to sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, including women, our governments and prominent donor agencies seem to continue to favour top-heavy agricultural development policies.
There is evidence of some civil society coalitions, such as the International Land Coalition and Via Campesina, which are trying to challenge the prevailing state and donor agricultural policies, instead trying to promote the need for equitable access to land through advocacy, dialogue and capacity-building initiatives across the borders of different countries.
Several indigenous peasant movements — such as the Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement and the Anjuman Mazaereen Punjab (AMP) in our own country — have also been trying to secure land rights. The AMP took a strong stance against attempts to evict and replace traditional sharecroppers with contract farmers on military farms in Punjab. The AMP, however, could do no more than halt evictions, without being able to secure legal land rights for tillers who have been cultivating lands controlled by the military since British times.
Nonetheless, there is need for such local peasant movements to be provided much more support and direction by larger international coalitions so that their resistance efforts can be channelled into a sustained push for altering land ownership patterns accompanied by more sustainable farming practices, which is the only feasible way to alleviate the visible rural disparities around the developing world.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 10th, 2012.
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A very weak and misleading article, Your emphasis on Agriculture is well founded however you have provided very little tangible facts, such as the geography your talking about (Pakistan is avast nation with 4 Provinces) Availability of water to crops, Water theft, cost of using Pesticides(environment) and fertilizers,cost of diesel etc fiscally the return on investment to the small farmer is very low, hence less cash for next crop and the spiral continues, allied to this is the rate/cost of crop as set by government or middleman ensures that farmer always loses out!
Rubbish .author while giving recomendations forgets,he is promoting socialist agenda that has died its natural death. Zero ground work hence poor analysis.