Rethink agri-reforms
The writer is an academic and researcher. He is also the author of Development, Poverty, and Power in Pakistan, available from Routledge
More Pakistanis live in rural areas, and there is a dearth of off-farm opportunities for them. It is thus necessary to revamp the agricultural sector. Boosting agricultural productivity could enable Pakistan to earn greater export revenues but if done in a way that helps address its growing unemployment challenges as well.
Sensible agricultural policies can help boost food production, improve livelihoods and help address a range of health issues related to food insecurity, including stunting and malnutrition-related complications. However, harnessing the potential of agricultural productivity to meet these varied goals, while simultaneously contending with the increasing threat of climate change, requires a drastic rethink.
Agricultural production in pre-independence Pakistan was geared towards production of cash crops like cotton. Massive British investments in the irrigation system in Punjab, for example, including creation of the so-called canal colonies in western Punjab, was impelled by the need to provide raw materials for the booming textile industry in Britian, rather than due to any benevolence towards the local rural populace.
The post-partition Pakistani state did little to alter the extractive colonial model of agricultural production. Instead, cultivable land was concentrated in the hands of the few, leading to absentee landlordism, and the use of land to control rural vote banks which propelled landowners to the legislature, in turn undermining attempts to redistribute cultivable land more judiciously.
International donors have been ineffective in alleviating rural marginalisation or addressing the structural causes for it within Pakistan, and many other poorer agrarian countries. Instead, top-down policies such as the Green Revolution encouraged use of capital-intensive agriculture which ushered in the era of mechanisation and a heavy reliance on chemical inputs that boosted productivity but wreaked environmental havoc.
Besides cotton production, which remains the primary agricultural crop grown in the country, Pakistan is ranked fifth in terms of the amount of cultivable land dedicated to sugarcane production. Pakistan is currently the ninth largest producer of sugarcane in the world, according to the national trade development authority. Sugarcane production is monopolised by a handful of powerful elites, who make exorbitant profits, despite sugarcane being a water-thirsty crop.
Now corporate farming is being hailed as the solution to harness technological knowhow to maximise yields and address rural poverty. Yet, corporate farming is another top-down strategy which will invariably cause further de-peasantisation. Most Pakistani cities are already crowded beyond capacity. Pakistan needs to focus on investments in human capital to boost its manufacturing capabilities, but there are no readily available jobs in the manufacturing sector waiting for ill-equipped agri-labourers and sharecroppers who will be driven off mid-sized or larger farms if they are consolidated via corporatisation to achieve economies of scale.
Securing equitable and sustainable agricultural development is not easy but the current situation is also equally untenable. Agriculture-linked land degradation is depleting our aquifers at an alarming rate and exacerbating land degradation and ecosystem decline. Soils in even the most fertile areas within the agricultural belt of the country now have very low fertility. Much of the irrigated land is water-logged or extremely saline.
It is still possible for Pakistan to achieve food sovereignty despite the problems. Yet, becoming food secure will need judicious distribution of land and water resources and a serious rethink concerning which crops to grow. Also, the government needs to give more attention to improving seed quality and developing climate smart practices which are relevant for small holders. The government must begin taxing large farmers. It also needs to ensure contracts for sharecropping and minimum wages for agri-labourers, including women, which could go a long way in addressing the glaring deprivation evident across most rural areas of the country today.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 25th, 2023.
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