Thinking beyond land access

There is insufficient public deliberation concerning supplemental measures required for land reforms to be effective.

The MQM’s recent decision to introduce a land reforms bill into parliament has rekindled a long neglected, yet increasingly urgent, debate for our country. Whatever the political motivations of the MQM may be, its proposed bill has at least stirred things up, and indicated that land reforms are not yet a dead issue in Pakistan. Side-stepping the political controversies surrounding the proposed Redistributive Land Reforms Bill 2010, this article will instead aim to contribute to the debate concerning the overall utility of land reforms.

No one denies that agriculture plays a vital role in our national economy. There is also consensus on the need to increase our overall agricultural productivity. However, the manner in which this goal can be achieved is where the differences in opinions seem irreconcilable. The need for land redistribution remains a major bone of contention.

The mainstream economic argument, endorsed by institutions like the World Bank, is that land redistribution in Pakistan will only serve to increase land fragmentation, which discourages investment required to boost agricultural productivity. Proponents of this approach are nudging the government to adopt the idea of corporate farming. The previous government had even passed a corporate farming ordinance, paving the way for leasing state land to agribusinesses. The World Bank is also trying to facilitate such processes by computerisation of land records to enable expedient agricultural land transactions.

While agribusiness may be able to invest more resources in agricultural production, and even pay agricultural labourers better salaries than landlords, opponents question how many more jobs the heavily mechanised agribusiness could create. It is also legitimate to ask if promoting export-driven agribusiness is a good idea for a country facing an alarming increase in food insecurity and water scarcity.

It is also hard to deny that rural poverty in Pakistan is evidently related to landlessness. The dependency of sharecroppers and daily wage labourers on landlords prevents both their socio-economic and political empowerment.

Secure access to land is considered the most powerful antidote to this widespread destitution and marginalisation. But to achieve their ambitious aims, land reforms need to go beyond provision of land alone. Proponents of land reforms must learn from international experience across Africa and Latin America which shows that just giving people land does not make them better off or even more empowered. Securing these broader goals requires that land redistribution be accompanied by a range of other measures simultaneously implemented under a comprehensive rural development strategy. Such a strategy must be devised to focus on small farmers or else tokenistic attempts at redistribution will do little to change existing disparities.

The MQM’s proposed bill has paid scant attention to such details and so far there is also insufficient public deliberation concerning the relevant supplemental measures required for land reforms to be effectively undertaken in a Pakistan-specific context.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 24^th, 2010.