What’s wrong with our agricultural policies?

Uneven land ownership patterns across rural areas in Sindh, other provinces are a major reason for growing hunger.

While a bulk of our populace still resides in rural areas and is directly involved in agricultural activities, Pakistan remains unable to overcome the problem of food insecurity. Agricultural production in Pakistan has admittedly faced severe challenges, including recurrent flooding over the past few years. Although comparatively mild, floods have affected 1.5 million people this year as well, with more damage expected during the current month. While these floods have obviously caused severe damage to rural livelihoods, due to the destruction of croplands, livestock and rural infrastructure, there are also other important factors responsible for the problems plaguing our agricultural sector and diminishing our food security.

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 6^th, 2013.

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