Land ownership before reconstruction post-flood

It almost seems an affront to common sense, yet is necessary to point out to aid and government agencies that they cannot claim to be helping poor people, if they pay for rebuilding their homes on property that belongs to someone else. This mistake was made during reconstruction following the earthquake, and there are indications of the same trend occurring in the post-flood rehabilitation phase.

There is an underlying reason which compels aid agencies to build people’s homes on land that does not belong to them. A majority of poor people do not possess any land due to highly uneven land ownership patterns in countries like Pakistan. Landlessness compels many poor people in rural areas to earn their living as share-croppers or agricultural labourers. Multitudes of such poor people not only work on land belonging to landlords, they also live on it.

There is a lesson to be learnt from the earthquake reconstruction, during which the plight of landless people was largely ignored. International donors and the Emergency Relief and Reconstruction Authority had made it compulsory for earthquake victims whose houses had been destroyed to use their $3,000 grant allocation for rebuilding homes, so that they would not squander away the grant money. Ironically, many poor people were resultantly compelled to construct homes on land which did not belong to them.

Local landlords had strongly resented ERRA’s handing over of funds to poor people, instead of putting them in charge of rebuilding tenant homes. Jirgas were held against ERRA at the behest of influential landlords, and even litigation was resorted to. In the end, this pressured ERRA to require memorandums of understandings between tenants and landlords, as a precondition to releasing reconstruction grants.

Thus, instead of utilizing the incoming aid to help landless tenants purchase a bit of land, and perhaps build a smaller home with the remaining allocation, the focus of ERRA and most donors remained confined to ensuring seismically resistant architectural designs or construction materials quality.

An even bigger opportunity may be lost after the floods. The International Organisation for Migration has informed donors that nearly $600 million is needed to repair or completely rebuild 1.8 million homes. Yet there is no mention of how many of these homes are actually located on property owned by landlords. It would be wise if some relevant agencies paid due attention to preventing housing reconstruction from becoming mired in the traditional land tenure regime.

Providing landless farmers land for cultivation purposes may seem too tall an order, but giving them a plot to build their own home, could still have beneficial spin-off effects. The marginalised poor will, for instance, feel less compelled to vote for whom their landlord wishes, or agree to unfair crop-sharing arrangements, which remain harder to defy with the ever looming threat of eviction from one’s place of residence.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 3^rd, 2010.