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Thursday March 28, 2024

Let them eat cake

By Zaigham Khan
May 30, 2016

Perhaps there is no single professional class more useless in the modern world – dominated by the neo-liberal economy – than peasants. According to an anthropologist, the world would barely notice if each and every peasant disappeared from the face of the earth one night.

In Pakistan, however, they serve a purpose – there is a whole class of scavengers that feeds on their poverty and powerlessness. As the Sharif model of development holds sway and agriculture fails, small farmers are facing unprecedented hardships; and there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

Except for a small number of farmers who own large tracts of land, most agriculturalists are struggling to survive. However, for smallholders it is tough to feed their families and ensure the bare minimum necessities of life. I am not talking about small communities living somewhere in Thar or in the Himalayas. There are 5.36 million marginal farms that comprise one hectare or less land according to the agriculture census of 2010.

Attach a family of eight persons to a farm and we find every fifth Pakistani depending on such a small farm for their livelihood. Even the owners of these farms are lucky. One notch below them are the landless sharecroppers, daily wage labourers and artisans, facing even tougher conditions. According to some estimates, 67 percent of those in the rural population own no land in Pakistan.

There is nothing new about transfer of resources from the poor to the rich, from agriculture to the industrial sector and from the poorer areas to the more developed districts in Pakistan. Despite the funny claims made in our textbooks that our country is a welfare state, Pakistan was born as an elitist state – and it remains one. The Sharif model of development has only taken these time-honoured, warped priorities to new heights with an utter disregard for the plight of the poor and less developed areas.

The farmers who came to protest in Lahore recently must have been impressed to see how the capital of Pakistan’s largest province has been transformed. A senior PML-N leader told me recently that the chief minister has a vision to turn the city into a Singapore. Considering a city as the centre and the rest of the country as the periphery is a centuries-old imperial model.

As Amir Taimoor (Tamerlane) told Hafiz Shirazi, he had devastated half of the world to make two cities – Samarkand and Bukhara – the envy of the world. (The poet, in one of his popular ghazals, had promised to give away both the cities to his beloved as a tribute to the beauty of a mole on her cheek). As more than half of the province’s budget is diverted to develop one city, the poorest segments of society and the poorest regions of the province are paying for the imperial fantasies of the ruling family.

For farmers sorrows have come in battalions. Even as farm productivity has declined due to high input prices and climate change, commodity prices have also collapsed. Farmers all over the country speak of climate change and its disastrous consequences on farming. According to Dr Mohsin Iqbal, director of the Global Impact Study Centre at Quaid-e-Azam University, the production of wheat could drop 10 to 20 percent while production of rice could drop 15 to 18 percent due to climate change. Experts fear that climate change can have a serious impact on livestock as well.

Such a situation requires a robust response from the government in the form of research on adaptation, and sharing the results of the research and innovation with farmers through effective agriculture extension services. However, agriculture departments are amongst the most neglected, under-resourced and inefficient in all the provinces. A huge confusion prevails in the government since the Ministry of Food and Agriculture that was responsible mainly for policy formulation, economic coordination, and planning with respect to food grains and agriculture was devolved to provinces as a result of the 18th Amendment.

Investment in agriculture research has gone down and officials of the extension departments can always be found at the farms of politically influential agriculturists or pushing the products of private companies. The collusion between industry and government officials has resulted in low quality, expensive inputs for farmers, particularly seeds and pesticides.

This attitude to agriculture is symbolised best by the fact that the federal government wants to set up a housing society at the land of Pakistan’s premier agriculture research institute, National Agriculture Research Institute (NARC). For our ruling elite, land is only a tool to get rich quick and help their cronies make a quick buck. The allotments of Rakhs in southern Punjab is a good example of policies based on the insatiable greed of the elite. When the British consolidated lands in Punjab, they turned communal lands into pastures managed by the government for environmental protection. Land from these communal pastures – called Rakhs (meaning protected area) – is routinely allotted to the most powerful government officials from the developed areas of the country while local landless farmers are not considered the rightful owners of this land.

Let’s take one more example. The world over, Sunday markets are considered farmers’ markets and are used as a mechanism for cutting down the middle man from the supply chain and giving farmers a chance to sell fresh produce directly to the urban consumer, thus benefitting both the rural economy and the consumer. In Pakistan, Sunday markets are run by retailers who use the normal supply chain. Prices at Sunday markets are slightly lower because the fruits and vegetables there are low in quality and the cost of doing business is subsidised by the government.

Pakistan’s industrial sector, which largely remains low-tech and reliant on agriculture, uses its clout to suppress farm gate prices of agriculture products. A senior official in Punjab’s agriculture department told me: “Even when a bad cotton crop is expected, we are pressured by industry to report high yield. As a result of these wrong estimates, not only Pakistani farmers but farmers from other developing countries also suffer because such news invariably has an impact on international commodity prices.” However, soon after a crop leaves these farmers, prices go up and remain high for the rest of the year. The government remains complicit in this never-ending hoax through acts of omission and commission.

Perhaps the biggest crisis farmers face is that of representation. Farmers themselves are not organised and there are hardly two or three civil society organisations that focus on agriculture. The majority of legislators are not agriculturists any longer and even those who are have diversified into industries thanks to crony capitalism. As owners of sugar mills and textile mills, their interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of farmers. The only major political figure who is vocal for farmers’ rights is Shah Mahmood Qureshi, who had declined an offer to set up a sugar mill of his own in the 1990s.

Pakistan’s agriculture needs urgent attention. But the larger problem of rural poverty cannot be solved through agriculture alone. It requires a paradigm shift in the way development is imagined in Pakistan. The rural areas need large-scale investment in infrastructure that unfortunately cannot be showcased as monuments. Even more importantly, Pakistan’s rural areas need serious investment in human development. Since these are all farfetched ideas, preferably the peasant should just disappear one night and let our ruling elite live in peace.

The writer is a social anthropologist and development professional.

Email: zaighamkhan@yahoo.com

Twitter: @zaighamkhan