Agrarian reforms — rhetoric and reality

With election fever escalating, it was interesting to note a seminar recently organised by several prominent NGOs entitled “Land and Agrarian Reforms on Political Agenda of Pakistan: Critical Review of Election Manifestos”. While several prominent politicians took some time out to be at this event, it was disappointing to see no real concrete results emerge from the gathering.

Bringing about tangible reforms in the agricultural sector remains vital in a country like Pakistan. Much of our population resides in rural areas and a large proportion of the people still depend on farm activities to secure livelihoods. Since there is a high concentration of land in the hands of a few, a large proportion of poor farmers do not have enough land, while others are landless and must work as sharecroppers or agricultural labourers.

Despite rhetorical statements, state and donor policies for agricultural development continue to sideline poor and landless farmers, and instead, place emphasis on the need for capital-intensive measures such as corporate farming, and the use of expensive agri-inputs (hybrid seeds or more pesticides/fertilisers).

Donor supported market-based schemes, such as the provision of microcredit, offer little opportunity to the rural poor to purchase assets like land, which remains a prerequisite for them to become sustainable farmers.

Conversely, redistributive land reforms have not been attempted in the country after the 1977 attempt and the subsequent decision by the Supreme Court to declare land reforms “un-Islamic”.

Since that time, most political parties have increasingly begun to rely on donor-endorsed, pro-growth agrarian reforms. The recent PPP government also emphasised the need for top-down rather than bottom-up agricultural growth strategies. It did no more for poor farmers than launch a tokenistic scheme to distribute a limited amount of state-owned agricultural land to poor women (Benazir Landless Hari Scheme), which unsurprisingly also fell prey to the usual problem of political patronage. Given this backdrop, rhetorical statements by politicians at an NGO-organised seminar, that they would launch effective agrarian reforms after coming to power, seem less encouraging. None of them seemed to articulate specific plans to address the challenge of inequitable land ownership.

While it is easy to reiterate the need to distribute more state land to poor farmers, there is hardly enough of it to go around, given how many poor rural people are landless. The MQM drafted a new bill on land reforms in 2011 but it completely failed to stimulate any significant debate in parliament.

The PTI is emphasising the need for taxing agriculture, yet it remains to be seen how the party would generate revenue from the rural sector in a progressive manner and redistribute these resources to benefit the poorer rural populace, given that it has opened its doors to many prominent landowners as well. One of the most prominent corporate farmers in the country, whose sprawling corporate farming ventures have leased thousands of acres of land and displaced numerous sharecroppers, is one of its senior leaders.

It is only politically insignificant entities like the Awami Workers Party (AWP) which seem serious about empowering poor farmers. The AWP has a pending appeal in the Supreme Court seeking a review of the decision that declared land reforms to be against Islam. Whether the judiciary will revoke its earlier decision, which has prevented land reforms in the country for the past two decades, remains to be seen.

Instead of organising seminars with vaguely defined agendas, NGOs need to sharpen the focus of their advocacy campaigns to address the above-mentioned gaps if they want to help alter the lingering status quo of rural disparities.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 15^th, 2013.