Superficial: PTI’s land reforms agenda

Pakistanis belonging to a wide spectrum of backgrounds have begun to associate hope with Imran Khan’s PTI and its ability to bring elusive prosperity to Pakistan. However, many others are more cautious not only due to the fact that Imran is hardly an experienced politician, but also because his political party has not been able to articulate reasonable policies which can effectively achieve his proclaimed goals.

The PTI’s education policy has come under scrutiny recently, and experts have raised legitimate concerns about it. Another issue which also deserves closer attention is how the PTI aims to address rural poverty amongst the landless poor. While rightly pointing out that there is little evidence that microfinance leads to poverty reduction, the PTI manifesto instead acknowledges that ownership of assets is a more credible route out of poverty. The manifesto itself mentions research, showing that ownership or access to assets such as land is the single most powerful variable that reduces poverty and contributes to economic empowerment of the poor. It also mentions how rural poverty incidence is 17 per cent amongst families owning some land, even as little as one acre, in comparison to 32 per cent for families which own no land. However, the manifesto itself does not present any clear vision about what needs to be done about the fact that a majority of the rural poor people do not own the land they cultivate.

The PTI’s Insaf Research Wing, which was created to conduct research in order to find solutions for major problems in Pakistan, has done scant work on the agricultural sector within its Pakistan Economic Research Report. While this report recognises feudal domination as an apparent reality across the country, the implications of access to land for the rural poor is not understood in a comprehensive enough manner. The PTI’s judicial reform proposals remain oblivious of the judicial ruling which declared land reforms as unIslamic. The PTI seems unaware of recent petitions aiming to challenge this ruling, or the fact that this judicial ruling was cited by the Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan to reject an MQM-formulated land reform bill in 2010. Lack of cognisance of such ongoing developments indicates that the PTI plans to do away with fedualism are not well thought through.

While the PTI claims to extol the virtues of self-reliance and less dependence on donors, at PTI’s major rallies, Imran Khan continues emphasising the need for digitising land records. Does he not realise that this effort at computerisation has already been initiated at the behest of the World Bank, which aims to create a more robust land market in Pakistan rather than enable more effective land redistribution?

One hopes that the induction within the PTI folds of a former World Bank specialist, as well as a prominent corporate farmer from southern Punjab, will not result in increased propagation of market-led rural development policies, which have limited impact on alleviating rural poverty. Moreover, the entry of several prominent feudals into the PTI senior ranks won’t bode well for undertaking effective land reforms, which is exactly what happened during Bhutto’s attempts in the 1970s.

Given the lack of adequate understanding or expertise within the PTI, concerning why access to land remains so uneven in our rural areas, and the converse prominence of vested interests which will obviously resist redistributing land to the tillers, one wonders how the party will achieve the goal stated in its manifesto of ensuring that “the maximum numbers of rural households own a minimum-specified area of land”.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 23^rd, 2012.