Time to abandon our elite farmer strategy

We need a bottom-up approach to agricultural development which emphasises on increasing productivity of small farmers.

Agriculture is an extremely important sector of Pakistan’s economy not only because it contributes around 21 per cent to the Gross Domestic Product, but because it provides employment to 45 per cent of the country’s labour force. Agriculture also provides raw material to the industrial sector and serves as a market for industrial products. While urbanisation is increasing, the majority of our population still resides in rural areas. Developments in the agriculture sector thus have major repercussions, which would resonate at multiple levels.

However, despite the significance of agriculture in the lives of the Pakistani masses, the majority of our agricultural development policies have focused on elite driven models of economic growth. Such myopic policymaking, however, contrasts significantly with prevalent realities. Consider, for instance, findings of the latest agricultural census, which highlighted a significant increase in the proportion of marginal and small farmers in our rural areas. Such an increase is not due to any redistributive land reform initiative launched by the government to resume large tracts of land held by landlords, but rather due to the fragmentation of land into smaller pieces due to intergenerational inheritance.

The latest census data shows that while marginal farms now account for almost 44 per cent of farms, these small farms own merely eight per cent of the total farm area in the country. These numbers do not include the multitudes of sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, including women, who own no land at all.

Due to the lack of sufficient land, families of an increasing number of small and marginal farmers are migrating to urban areas hoping to escape poverty. Unfortunately, increasing migration from rural areas is exerting more pressure on cities which are grappling with the need to provide basic infrastructure and services to their burgeoning population. Lack of opportunities will compel a majority of this rural influx to end up working in the informal sector. Earning extremely low wages, these rural migrants will not be able to adequately meet the needs of their children and the cycle of poverty will persist.

Instead of trying to launch another capital-intensive green revolution spearheaded by the landed elite with the aim of boosting exports, Pakistan needs a bottom-up approach to agricultural development which emphasises national food security and relies on increasing the productivity of smaller farmers. Instead of relying on market-based strategies and encouraging agribusinesses to invest in agriculture, our government needs to ensure that landless farmers are given state land grants rather than military officers, along with paying attention to supplemental policies improving their access to irrigation water, credit and markets.

Instead of trying to encourage corporate farming, rural development planners need to pay attention to small and medium-sized farmers (owing land below 25 acres), who constitute 94 per cent of the total number of farms and over 60 per cent of the total farm area.

For raising small farmer yields, creation of a Small Farmer Development Corporation (SFDC), owned by small farmers and run by professionals as a social enterprise, has been proposed. An entity such as the SFDC could provide the needed support to smaller farmers to help boost their household incomes and improve overall agricultural productivity.

It is time to discard reliance on the landed elite who have done little to boost agricultural productivity and instead used their control over land to capture rural vote banks and influence policymaking to their own advantage.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 14^th,  2014.

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