DEVELOPMENT: Threat of rural discontent —Syed Mohammad Ali

The Pakistani government and our international donors continue to shy away from dealing with the problem of unequal land ownership. It makes strategic sense for militant extremists in Pakistan to exploit deep resentment among landless tenants toward wealthy landlords, to engineer a class revolt

The inability of our rulers to provide basic levels of services to citizens across Pakistan has justifiably provoked a widespread sense of disillusionment and despondency. Besides the human suffering caused by this repeated failure to ensure public welfare, the ongoing conflict with militant extremists has created a dangerous situation, since brewing discontent potentially provides the source of further destabilisation. This article will draw attention to some underlying issues that result in preserving a bulk of lingering disparities in our country. Particular attention will be given to inequalities across the rural areas, where a majority of our population still resides.
Poverty in rural Pakistan is still strongly correlated with landlessness. Almost 70 percent of the rural population has no land, while a minuscule percentage of large landowners control a major proportion of cultivable land. This unequal land ownership persists across the country, despite the fact that agriculture is the most feasible livelihood for the rural poor, who lack education among other skills, resulting in little employment options within their localities. This situation explains why so many poor farmers agree to crop sharing agreements, whereby they give away half of their produce to a land owner, just for getting access to a piece of land.
Recent research indicates that land distribution patterns have been changing for the worse. Besides continued concentration of land in a few hands, there is a reduction in total area given out to sharecroppers. The demand for capital-intensive cash crops and the growing influence of multinational agricultural business interests may be factors behind this trend. It is, nonetheless, a troubling sign for the rural poor. Many rural families are now making ends meet by livestock rearing, sending family members to find work in cities, or working as daily wage labourers for measly wages.
While it was in the British colonial interest to give private property rights to zamindars in the subcontinent, post-independence Pakistani governments have chosen to protect landlord interests, many of whom have also became prominent politicians. Two past governments under Ayub Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto tried to undertake land redistribution measures, but both these attempts had design flaws and lacked effective implementation. There was, thus, hardly any impact on redistribution of land holdings. After the judiciary decided against the need for land reforms back in the 1980s, the motivation and justification for introducing further reforms dissipated.
On the other hand, attempts to prohibit tenant evictions from property owned by landlords, or exacting free or ‘bonded’ labour from the poor, have been sporadic. A poor farmer can hardly afford to take a stand against unjust treatment by a landlord since the latter is backed by the local administration and police. Furthermore, the military and bureaucracy have not only developed a vested interest in preserving existing land ownership patterns, the military also came into direct conflict with poor tenant farmers working on the Okara Military Farms some years ago. The dispute occurred when tenants resisted attempts to put in place new contract arrangements that would have increased profits for the military farms, but undermined their right to continue cultivating these lands. The Rangers have similarly conflicted with fisherfolk communities residing along the coastal areas over control of local lakes.
Moreover, the government’s continued inability to administer justice and provide other basic facilities like clean drinking water, sanitation, quality schooling and health facilities make the standard of life in most rural areas even worse. Improved irrigation, fertilisers, seed varieties and major subsidies for agricultural inputs have mostly benefited the rich instead of the poor and landless farmers. Bank lending has been made available mostly to big landlords and while micro-credit schemes are reaching out to the poor, they too charge high interest rates to the poorest of the poor who cannot qualify to receive or pay back the loans.
Such ground realities should demonstrate why the poor and landless rural populace may feel disgruntled. However, the Pakistani government and our international donors continue to shy away from dealing with the problem of unequal land ownership. Prominent donors like the World Bank admit that the continued concentration of land and power among a very small class of landowners is a problem. But their proposed solutions are preoccupied with the use of market mechanisms to induce growth through liberalising Pakistan’s agricultural sector, so as not to disrupt the global trade regime, a proposition that is not promising for the poor and landless.
The feared growth of militancy in southern Punjab, which has highly unequal land ownership patterns, should be a major wake-up call for both the international donor community and our policy makers. There is also evidence of the Taliban having tried to gain traction by claiming to respond to the grievances of the rural poor by administering justice in Swat. The US administration seems to suspect that the Taliban are keen to build popular support based in part upon anger over unequal distribution of land and unfair owner-tenant contracts. It does make strategic sense for militant extremists in Pakistan to exploit deep resentment among landless tenants toward wealthy landlords, to engineer a class revolt. International experiences in this context provide further cause for alarm. The social costs of failing to introduce reform have often led to peasant uprisings and civil war. Rural discontent fuelled the communist overthrow in Russia, Vietnam and China. What has recently been happening in Sudan, Nepal, Zimbabwe, El Salvador and Peru further illustrates how discontent over land tenure and ownership can be successfully used to gain popular support for perpetuating violence.
What Pakistan desperately needs is a nationwide effort designed specifically to strengthen access to land for the landless, not only due to the fear of exacerbating conflict, but also because it is about time that the masses be given a real chance to overcome their lingering deprivation.

The writer is a researcher. He can be contacted at ali@policy.hu