According to farming community representatives, the country’s per acre yield of crops has remained stagnant since 1999, while the population has increased by about 30 million, which is considered a major reason for growing food insecurity. In Sindh alone, which is home to 35 million people, more than 71 per cent of the population is estimated to be experiencing various degrees of food insecurity, while 17 per cent of them are categorised to be experiencing ‘severe hunger’. In a recent report, the Sindh Government’s Department for Planning and Development admits that hunger is widespread in the province, despite the availability of sufficient fertile farmland.
It is the uneven land ownership patterns across rural areas in Sindh and the other provinces, which are thus considered a major reason for the growing hunger in the country. The majority of cultivable land is owned by large landowners, who tend to concentrate on growing cash crops like cotton, or producing food for the market, which is not affordable for poorer families.
Due to lack of access to agricultural land, a major proportion of poor farmers are compelled to work as sharecroppers, or seasonal or daily wage agricultural labourers. Recent government efforts like distributing state land to landless women in Sindh under the Benazir Landless Hari Scheme were just tokenistic measures, which have done little to alter ground realities for the disempowered rural masses.
Unfortunately, successive governments in our country continue to rely on large landowners to achieve agricultural growth and boost its export earnings. The much-lauded ‘Green Revolution’ back in the 1960s had set the precedent of offering larger farmers access to state subsidies in order for them to engage in capital intensive farming rather than paying due attention to helping poorer subsistence farmers. This top-down model of agricultural development has continued to be endorsed due to the increasing emphasis on liberalisation of the agricultural sector. Based on advice from development agencies like the World Bank, large landowners are either leasing their lands to commercial farmers or else engaging in capital-intensive farming themselves. Poor sharecroppers lacking the resources to pay upfront lease rents, in addition to purchasing the needed inputs required for cultivation, are instead finding it difficult to remain engaged in agricultural production in order to grow enough food for their own families.
In order to improve the dire malnutrition situation across our rural and urban areas, it is vital that the government and donor agencies shift their attention to promoting cultivation of food crops suitable to indigenous environments instead of cash cropping and earning foreign exchange through agricultural exports.
Unless serious efforts are made to provide the rural poor greater access to land and the required support services to help them become sustainable farmers, achieving food sovereignty will remain an elusive goal, and the masses in our country will continue to experience hunger, its correlated health problems, and different forms of social unrest.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 6th, 2013.
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COMMENTS (7)
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My 1960s-vintage Encyclopedia Britannica has a photograph of South Koreans visiting Pakistan to learn about improving their agriculture. What has happened to Pakistan since?
Let me pose a question as an engineer and a farmer. In the US 3% of the population farms and is heavily subsidized by the Govt. They feed 1/2 of the world. This is possible because of abundant availability of land. In Pakistan, irrespective of the number of persons in agriculture now, what do you think will be the eventual steady state percentage figure for the kind of efficiency the US is showing (given our limited land availability). Back it up with an example of a country presently there.
Dear sir, The developed nations never resorted to land redistribution for it creates SUBSISTANCE FARMING which is a bane to agri- economy.. We survive because of our agri economy and have not yet become a starving african nation. We need bigger farms and cooperatives need to be encouraged to bring small holdings together for better efficiency and larger production. The negative side is a large portion of farmers would be without work for mechanisation which creates efficiency needs less labour.----------------So think another way to combine the two systems like govt controlled machinery available at less prices to small farmers i.e 20 acres or less. Why are writers whose only experience with farming is house plants and flower pots, the most vocal on land distribution. Due they understand the ramifications for our food security.
Market Intermediaries and their margins are also a major factor in growing food insecurity across the country. Govt has got to pay attention towards market structure too.
The fact is that small family owned farms are being squeezed out in other countries too because of high capital investment and let us not forget the economies of scale do set in large farming outfits. Small land owners can't sustain sustainable living and therefore they are bound to be marginalized. In Pakistan, right from beginning the feudals saw to it that they must represent themselves in the National and Provincial Assemblies and in turn make laws which were most favorable to them on the expense of small farm holders and others. For a while we did witness this shift in K-P to help the tenants and subsistence farming by encouraging industries in the rural areas to ween the rural population and in turn get them off from the yoke of big land lords ( the Khans). Sure, it did curtail the Khans hold over their peasants and above all made labor more expensive for the Khans to keep specially those peasants who opted to stay but the migration kept on going to the industry. I thought it was one way to make big land holdings more efficient with production by switching to intensive capital investments. Some time it is cheaper to import grain and export high yielding cash crops or it's final products.
all we need is planning and action. yes we got resources.