"Despite being an agricultural country, Pakistan’s rural areas suffer from rampant poverty and food scarcity," SCOPE chief executive Tanvir Arif. PHOTO: INP
HYDERABAD: The feudal system and corporate farming are equally responsible for the plight of farmers and the food insecurity in the country. These views were expressed by speakers at a workshop titled ‘People’s tribunal on land rights in Sindh’, organised by the Society for Conservation and Protection of Environment, Oxfam and Grow campaign.
The speakers accused the Sindh government of flawed policies with regard to land distribution and lease, calling for amendments in the law to empower peasants.
“Foreign countries and investors in corporate farming in Pakistan are taking the crop produce from here to their respective countries. This will cause food insecurity in Pakistan,” said Scope chief executive Tanvir Arif. “Despite being an agricultural country, Pakistan’s rural areas suffer from rampant poverty and food scarcity. This is a matter of great concern.”
Oxfam’s Shahbaz Bokhari maintained that up to half of the country’s population is edging towards food insecurity. He cited the example of Tharparkar, where the drought has affected humans and livestock. “The only way forward is to distribute land among landless peasants,” he suggested.
Former Supreme Court judge Wajeehuddin Ahmed pointed out weaknesses in the land ownership and lease rules. He proposed that possession of the land, distributed free among landless peasants, should be restricted to the lifespan of the lease holder. The government, he added, should take back possession after the death of a lease-holder to redistribute of the land.
He claimed that most of the land distributed by the Sindh government among women landless peasants could not be cultivated for several reasons. These included disputes over ownership and possession, lack of financial resources for crop inputs and unavailability of water.”
The forest department’s chief conservator, Riaz Hussain Wagan, revealed that 47,000 acres of forest land was under illegal occupation, in addition to the tens of thousands of acres that have been legally leased out. “We have given detailed encroachment lists of the people who have occupied forest land and their political connections to the district level vigilance committees headed by district and sessions judges.”
Published in The Express Tribune, March 27th, 2014.
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China is actively encouraging large scale holdings for farms as that is the only way to make cost effective advanced technologies.
We need to increase yields and the only way is to incorporate the latest farming technology, whose cost is unviable for small land holdings.
India's land ceiling is a failed experiment because India has been bleeding hundreds of billions of rupees annually in subsidies to the agriculture sector. Money that we already do not have and which will eventually lead India to bankruptcy.
Farming is a business like any other, yet no one says that their should be a limit on a car factory or a textile mill. As in other businesses there is a concept called economies of scale, which many people forget about when it comes to agriculture. Most people think that farmers are these extremely rich and powerful class of people who deserve their holdings to be snatched away from them.
The fact is that most of those farmers have not made their fortunes through farming but through politics and in turn robbing the nation. They just hide behind their farming assets to justify their wealth. In addition these very people including the ex president have grabbed tens of thousands of acres of state land. The bottom line is that if only we can implement the law and bring justice in our country, can we move forward to a state where there is prosperity for the masses. Stealing land from farmers who have successfully built up there land holdings through hard work and Allah's grace is extremely unfair, unjust and unethical.
The first step is to abolish jagirdari and zamindari and impose land sealing like India and distribute the surplus land amongst the poor landless people.