5% people hold 64% of Pakistan’s farmland

[shuntmaster]

5pc people hold 64pc of Pakistan’s farmland, moot told

Speaking at the workshop, SCOPE chief executive officer Tanveer Arif said poverty and food security issues were closely linked to land, therefore, land and agriculture reforms should be made in the country.

KARACHI: Five per cent bigwigs possess 64pc of Pakistan’s farmland while 50.8pc rural households are landless.

This was stated at a workshop on ‘Status of land reforms in Pakistan’ organised by the Society for Conservation and Protection of Environment (SCOPE) in collaboration with the Sindh High Court Bar Association and the National Peasants Coalition of Pakistan in a hotel.

Justice Faisal Arab, senior puisne judge of the Sindh High Court, lawyer and farmer leaders attended the programme.

Speaking at the workshop, SCOPE chief executive officer Tanveer Arif said that agriculture was the mainstay of Pakistan’s economy, accounting for 25pc of the gross domestic product, 60pc of export earnings and 48pc of employment.

He said poverty and food security issues were closely linked to land, therefore, land and agriculture reforms should be made in the country.

He said Pakistan inherited feudal system from the British Raj. Land distribution in Pakistan was highly unequal as 5pc of large landholders possess 64pc of the total farmland and 65pc small farmers held 15pc of land. He said corporate farming was initiated in Pakistan during former President Pervez Musharraf’s government which was against the rights of farmers. Some Gulf countries had purchased lands in Pakistan, particularly in Sindh and Balochistan, that would cause water scarcity and deprive local farming community of their rights.

Mr Arif said 50.8pc of rural households were landless while the poverty among rural landless people was high. He said land reforms were necessary to alleviate poverty, hunger and malnutrition in Pakistan.

The farmers in rural areas were living under extreme poverty due to unjust crop share being given to them by landlords.

The peasants were facing malnutrition and severe economic constraints due to that injustice.

Large landholdings should be distributed among landless farmers and atmosphere of land equality be created to make farmers prosperous, he concluded.

Akhtar Hussain, a Supreme Court advocate, said agriculture income tax should be imposed in the country while land reforms were also a must for development. He said that agriculture income tax was opposed by landlords, which was unjustified.

Mustafa Lakhani, president of the Sindh High Court Bar Association, said that feudalism was big hindrance in land reforms in Pakistan.

He sought a role of the present government in making land reforms in the country. Excessive powers had caused corruption in Pakistan.

National Peasants Coalition of Pakistan representative Noor Nabi Rahujo said the country could not make progress without land reforms. He urged all stakeholders of society to join forces and play their due roles in making drastic land and agriculture reforms in Pakistan.

Advocate Qazi Ali Athar said a relentless struggle should be launched for land reforms in Pakistan. He said Sufi Shah Inayat was killed in the Mughal era for his struggle for rights of the farming community. There was a need to follow his struggle for brining about agriculture reforms in the country.

He said land reforms not but actual need was to get land rights.

Comrade Ramzan Memon called for a result-oriented struggle to get land rights. He said Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had tried to make land reforms but his plan was reversed during the Zia era.—PPI

 

[AUz]

Shows how pathetic situation in Pakistan is...

 

[shuntmaster]

Why not land reforms?

SOME political parties are promising to create a new or naya Pakistan, others are promising to go back to the Pakistan that had originally been dreamt of. But all are promising fundamental changes: defending the status quo is not an option in this election.

Even if parties want to actually defend the status quo, seeing the mood of the public, they are promising change. But, still, no party has made land reform a basic plank of their manifesto.

Can we think of changing Pakistan fundamentally without changing the politics of land, rural or urban, in the country? Many people now argue that Pakistan is no longer feudal. And they may well be right. A feudal society, defined in terms of certain modes of production and ownership patterns of productive assets, might not be what is present in Pakistan. But the nexus between land and power is still very strong.

Land buying and selling, for certain castes and classes, is almost impossible; landowning is associated with access to a lot of other important services, and there are clear links between landowners and tiers of the state at the local level: the police, courts and the bureaucracy. So how can the issue of land market reform not be important?

Large landholdings are still an issue in some parts of the country. And we do need to deal with it. But that is not all that is meant when land reforms are talked about.

Land reforms are about opening up land markets so that any person with money, and from whatever class or caste, can buy land when available; giving state land to people for productive use; reducing or eliminating holdings of the military and government departments; consolidating land parcels; keeping land records more efficiently to lessen or eliminate the role of the patwari; updating land titling to allow more land to come to the markets; and breaking the nexus between landowners and state institutions like the police, local courts and politics.

One of the more effective ways of tackling poverty is through the distribution of productive assets to the poor. For rural areas, given that the majority of poor already have a link with agriculture and/or have human capital in this area, giving land to the poor and/or livestock, makes the most sense. Given current poverty levels, can we afford to not think about distributing or redistributing land?

The major parties have either ignored the issue in their manifestoes or given rather weak and lukewarm ideas. The PPP has not really taken up the issue even though it was the PPP that brought in the 1972 regulations for land reform. The PML-N has focused only on computerisation and land consolidation. The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf does promise giving state land to the poor, and computerising records etc., which others do too, but starts off by saying that it will implement the existing legislation on land reforms.

There is a problem with the existing legislation. A Sharia appellate bench of the Supreme Court, comprising three judges and two ulema, declared that land reforms were un-Islamic. This was on appeal after the Federal Sharia Court had held that land reforms were Islamic. If the promise is to implement existing legislation and the appellate court’s decision stands then, subject to the court’s definition of what constitutes land reform, we are saying that there cannot be any land reform.

The decision of the appellate bench needs to challenged and reconsidered. It was not a unanimous decision (one judge had dissented and dismissed the appeal), and there are issues with the Sharia bench’s jurisdiction regarding the cases on land reform. Earlier, the court had dismissed the same case.

But more crucially, it is hard to accept that we have to give up a very important means of creating equity, equality, social justice and social harmony because of a weak judgment by the court, when even the head of the bench acknowledged that the court had been poorly assisted in the case.

Does Islam really consider land reform to be un-Islamic? If so, why? Is it about the takeover of private property by the state? Does this hold under all circumstances? And what about elements that are not halal or religiously acceptable? If the state buys out private property, to redistribute it to the poor, is it unacceptable? Would that be the case even if the government pays market prices? Or is it unacceptable if the price is less than market price?

The other elements of land reform pertaining to reducing the patwari’s role, land consolidation and transfer, and updating land ownership data, are even less controversial from the Islamic standpoint. All of these elements can clearly be part of the strategy for all parties and should be.

But irrespective of the above, no party has made the issue an important part of their manifesto and we have not heard anything about it in the campaign so far. Is this a reflection of the power of the landowning classes? Do we still need an argument for why the issue is important? Is it a comment on the health of our democracy that even the numerically superior hordes of the poor cannot make such an important issue come on the agenda of the mainstream parties?

There is a petition with the Supreme Court that is looking to challenge the basis of the appellate court decision. We hope the court will take it up soon. And we hope the incoming government, in the interest of the majority, will also support the petition and join the argument for opening the doors to land reforms.

The writer is senior adviser, Pakistan, at Open Society Foundations, associate professor of economics, LUMS, and a visiting fellow at IDEAS, Lahore.

PAKISTAN: Absence of land reform entrenches poverty - activists

LAHORE, 28 September 2009 (IRIN) - Dotted around Pakistan are vast estates run by feudal landlords who command enormous economic and political power, condemning their tenants to poverty, reform activists charge.

On some of these estates, debt bondage has forced 1.8 million people to work the land for no pay, generation after generation, according to the campaigning group Anti-Slavery International. On others, sharecropping systems are practised, under which landless tenants hand over between two-thirds and half of the crops they produce to the landowner.

"Without distributing land among tenants and landless peasants, there is no possibility of progress. The end of feudalism is a must for modernizing society. Until effective land reforms are carried out, poverty can never be eliminated," Farooq Tariq, secretary-general of the Kissan Rabita Committee, an alliance of 22 peasant organizations, told IRIN.

Unlike other countries in the region, including India, Pakistan did not carry out land reforms after 1947, and attempts in the 1950s and 1970s to reduce the size of land holdings had limited impact.

"Land reform has not taken place because the lawmakers in many cases themselves have large land holdings and will never want to transfer ownership to tenants. There will be no land reform until [the] people are in control of governance," Mubashir Hasan, a former finance minister and social activist, told IRIN.

About 2 percent of households control more than 45 percent of the land area. Powerful farmers have also taken advantage of government subsidies in water and agriculture, and benefited from technological improvements which have boosted yields, according to the World Bank.

Without distributing land among tenants and landless peasants, there is no possibility of progress. The end of feudalism is a must for modernizing societyLittle progress

By 1977 the biggest estates had only surrendered about 520,000 hectares, and nearly 285,000 hectares had been redistributed among some 71,000 farmers. Around 3,529 landowners have 513,114 holdings of more than 40.5 hectares in irrigated areas, and 332,273 holdings of more than 40.5 hectares in non-irrigated areas, according to the government's annual Economic Survey.

"We manage to earn a little for ourselves by selling the surplus corn and wheat that we take from the land. It is hard work, but despite this we have not been able to escape poverty. None of my four sons is educated beyond the eighth grade. We needed their labour on the land," said Kareem Muhammad, a landless tenant on a farm near the town of Okara, about 110km south of Lahore.

In Punjab, both sharecropping and fixed-rent contracts - where a rent per acre farmed is paid to the landowner by tenants - are practised. In Sindh, about one third of the land falls under fixed-rent contracts and about two thirds of the land is sharecropped, government surveys show.


Photo: Kamila Hyat/IRIN
Landless farmers live in poverty on estates across the country, working land owned by rich landlords Discontent

The sense of injustice created by the continued hold of feudal landlords and the poverty this gives rise to has been a key factor in rising social discontent - aided and abetted by militant groups.

"I am a landless farmer. Last year my teenage son was persuaded by members of an organization engaged in jihad [holy war] to come away with them. They told him it is better to wield a gun and learn to use it than eke out a miserable existence tilling land," Riazuddin Ahmed, from Vehari in southern Punjab, told IRIN.

"My son is only 17. He saw no hope ahead of him, and therefore went away with these people. His mother and I are distraught. But we believe he has gone to the northern areas and we have no means of finding him," he said.

Former finance minister Hassan blamed this on oppression and misery. "Today, governance has collapsed. Extremism has grown and weapons have proliferated," he said.

According to the World Bank, 33 percent of Pakistan's 162 million people live below the poverty line.

Farming contributes 21 percent to gross domestic product (GDP) and employs 44 percent of the workforce, according to the government's annual Economic Survey. Of the total land area of 80.4 million hectares, about 22 million are cultivated, according to official data. Nearly 65 percent of this cultivated area is in Punjab, about 25 percent in Sindh and 10 percent in the North West Frontier Province and Balochistan.

 

[Leader]

Land Reforms required !!

 

[GURU DUTT]

Most of the problems of pakistan today have there origins in feudal sysytem as feudals have kept the massess ignorant and poor by design for too long now thats the main reason there is no rule of law for ordinarry person and feudls are above the law , feudlas play game of musical chair in name of democracy and have abused all the resources of pakistan but managed to keep people running after so called 'truck ki battie' for long some time it was India , some time the Ummah and some times its jihad against one and all (all non sunnies & muslims)

 

[Saleem]

5pc people hold 64pc of Pakistan’s farmland, moot told

Speaking at the workshop, SCOPE chief executive officer Tanveer Arif said poverty and food security issues were closely linked to land, therefore, land and agriculture reforms should be made in the country.

KARACHI: Five per cent bigwigs possess 64pc of Pakistan’s farmland while 50.8pc rural households are landless.

This was stated at a workshop on ‘Status of land reforms in Pakistan’ organised by the Society for Conservation and Protection of Environment (SCOPE) in collaboration with the Sindh High Court Bar Association and the National Peasants Coalition of Pakistan in a hotel.

Justice Faisal Arab, senior puisne judge of the Sindh High Court, lawyer and farmer leaders attended the programme.

Speaking at the workshop, SCOPE chief executive officer Tanveer Arif said that agriculture was the mainstay of Pakistan’s economy, accounting for 25pc of the gross domestic product, 60pc of export earnings and 48pc of employment.

He said poverty and food security issues were closely linked to land, therefore, land and agriculture reforms should be made in the country.

He said Pakistan inherited feudal system from the British Raj. Land distribution in Pakistan was highly unequal as 5pc of large landholders possess 64pc of the total farmland and 65pc small farmers held 15pc of land. He said corporate farming was initiated in Pakistan during former President Pervez Musharraf’s government which was against the rights of farmers. Some Gulf countries had purchased lands in Pakistan, particularly in Sindh and Balochistan, that would cause water scarcity and deprive local farming community of their rights.

Mr Arif said 50.8pc of rural households were landless while the poverty among rural landless people was high. He said land reforms were necessary to alleviate poverty, hunger and malnutrition in Pakistan.

The farmers in rural areas were living under extreme poverty due to unjust crop share being given to them by landlords.

The peasants were facing malnutrition and severe economic constraints due to that injustice.

Large landholdings should be distributed among landless farmers and atmosphere of land equality be created to make farmers prosperous, he concluded.

Akhtar Hussain, a Supreme Court advocate, said agriculture income tax should be imposed in the country while land reforms were also a must for development. He said that agriculture income tax was opposed by landlords, which was unjustified.

Mustafa Lakhani, president of the Sindh High Court Bar Association, said that feudalism was big hindrance in land reforms in Pakistan.

He sought a role of the present government in making land reforms in the country. Excessive powers had caused corruption in Pakistan.

National Peasants Coalition of Pakistan representative Noor Nabi Rahujo said the country could not make progress without land reforms. He urged all stakeholders of society to join forces and play their due roles in making drastic land and agriculture reforms in Pakistan.

Advocate Qazi Ali Athar said a relentless struggle should be launched for land reforms in Pakistan. He said Sufi Shah Inayat was killed in the Mughal era for his struggle for rights of the farming community. There was a need to follow his struggle for brining about agriculture reforms in the country.

He said land reforms not but actual need was to get land rights.

Comrade Ramzan Memon called for a result-oriented struggle to get land rights. He said Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had tried to make land reforms but his plan was reversed during the Zia era.—PPI

after 1857 lands were allotted to most obedients slaves of the british crown...all landoweners at independence should hace their lands confiscated and put to national use....in addtion these traitors need to be given prison sentences of RI for 30 years.....

 

[shuntmaster]

Most of the problems of pakistan today have there origins in feudal sysytem as feudals have kept the massess ignorant and poor by design for too long now thats the main reason there is no rule of law for ordinarry person and feudls are above the law , feudlas play game of musical chair in name of democracy and have abused all the resources of pakistan but managed to keep people running after so called 'truck ki battie' for long some time it was India , some time the Ummah and some times its jihad against one and all (all non sunnies & muslims)

Pakistan was created by the feudals, for the feudals. Jinnah and Islam were just convenient tools. When it became obvious that the British were ready to give independance to India, the Muslim feudals realized that the Congress which was democratic and socialistic in nature and dominated by the masses, would introduce land reforms. Land was the source of all power and wealth of these feudals and they would never give it up. That was the genesis of the two nation theory which gave birth to Pakistan. The fact there was never any serious call for land reforms or even a debate on it in over 66years of Pakistan's existence proves this point

 

[Cherokee]

Good That India got Land reforms , even if it not good enough .

 

[Ayush]

do away with feudalism

 

[INDIC]

Comrade Ramzan Memon called for a result-oriented struggle to get land rights. He said Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had tried to make land reforms but his plan was reversed during the Zia era.—PPI

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was himself a Landlord from Larkana or a better called as a Feudal Socialist.

 

[shuntmaster]

Good That India got Land reforms , even if it not good enough .

Land reforms is the main cause of the creation of middle class in India and this middle class is powering the nations growth.

 

[GURU DUTT]

Pakistan was created by the feudals, for the feudals. Jinnah and Islam were just convenient tools. When it became obvious that the British were ready to give independance to India, the Muslim feudals realized that the Congress which was democratic and socialistic in nature and dominated by the masses, would introduce land reforms. Land was the source of all power and wealth of these feudals and they would never give it up. That was the genesis of the two nation theory which gave birth to Pakistan. The fact there was never any serious call for land reforms or even a debate on it in over 66years of Pakistan's existence proves this point

wonder why there are no Pakistani intellectuals on this thread now cause most of them are basically feudals and it hurts them from within when someone talks about truth and those who hide truth never talk about it rather try to scuttle the talk by introducing false and melicious notions like ummah and conspiracy theories

 

[shree835]

Land Reforms required !!

It will never happen .... At Pakistan , no government has GUTS to do so....Please accept the FACT.

 

[shuntmaster]

wonder why there are no Pakistani intellectuals on this thread now cause most of them are basically feudals and it hurts them from within when someone talks about truth and those who hide truth never talk about it rather try to scuttle the talk by introducing false and melicious notions like ummah and conspiracy theories

The feudals were the original elite of Pakistan. They were soon joined by the bureaucrats, who were later joined by the military brass, industrialists and politicians. They are all joined at the hip and family connections. This arrangement has been going on since birth of Pakistan until recently. Sometimes the civilian elites dominated, sometimes the military elites dominated. The common masses had no say. Lately we see a new groups trying to nudge in into this elite club. One is the judiciary and other is Islamist. The Islamists have been used and abused by the elites over decades. Now the Islamists have realized this and trying to be the elite on their own and the traditional elites are on defensive. The murder of Salman Taseer and the reaction of the public is a testament to this.

 

[shree835]

Those 5% peoples are holding Pakistan militarily and politically...Rest population follows that 5%.