Land reforms making a comeback

Ex prime minister Jamali had claimed that land reforms were a dead issue, though recent bills prove otherwise.

Some interesting developments are taking place to indicate that the long neglected issue of land reforms may make a comeback on our policy agenda. These developments have included the formulation of a new land reforms bill during the past year, the filing of a petition in the Supreme Court (SC) recently to undertake land reforms, as well as the Senate’s passage of the bill prescribing punishments for a range of anti-women practices, including denial of their property rights.

Land distribution across agrarian Pakistan remains highly inequitable. This uneven land ownership compels landless peasants, to either lease land or else they are made to give away different proportions of their produce, under varying share-cropping arrangements, to landlords, or they must try to ensure household survival through other means, including migration to our already bulging cities.

The fact that three prior land reform attempts failed to achieve their objectives is well known. Former prime minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali had claimed that land reforms had become a dead issue in Pakistan and our current prime minister would perhaps not disagree with such an assertion, given his own vested land interests, as well as continued political reliance on feudal mechanisms to capture vote banks. However, some prominent political forces have realised the potential of reasserting the land reforms slogan to make further political inroads. The MQM formulated another land reforms bill last year, for instance, in order to gain more political sympathy in rural Sindh and Punjab. While this bill itself was not passed into law, other emerging politicians like Imran Khan are now also mentioning the need to focus on land reforms. However, a lot more thought needs to go into making effective legislation for land reforms.

Some of the smaller progressive political parties, trade unions and women’s groups have also begun to take up this issue again and almost 30 of them have developed a consensus on how to move forward on this issue. This has led to the submission of two petitions in the SC calling for election and land reforms. These two issues have rightly been conjoined through the argument that no individual from the middle or lower class can contest the elections in the presence of a feudal culture and thus land and election reforms are two sides of the same coin. These petitioners have also asked the SC to review its earlier decision upholding the Shariat Appellate bench’s decision, which had declared land reforms un-Islamic.

On the other hand, women legislators and advocates have managed to push through the Anti-Women Practices Bill through the Senate, which prohibits not only forced marriage but also prevents prevents women from inheriting property through deceitful or illegal means by prescribing stringent punishments in the form of imprisonment and fines. This is a very important step given that a vast majority of women in our country are also currently being denied land ownership rights despite legal provisions and their significant contribution to agricultural production.

What is now needed is for major international donors like the World Bank, for instance, to realise that corporate farming is hardly a viable solution for ending gender discrimination, rural deprivation, or food insecurity. Without making land ownership arrangements more equitable, goals such as sustainable development prove hard to achieve.

It is precisely this multipronged realisation and subsequent efforts which are needed to not only bring land reforms back on the agenda for our policymakers, but also to ensure thier effective implementation which in effect helps alter the ground realities of the growing deprivation evident across different parts our country.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 18^th, 2011.