How not to farm

In our social studies books in schools in the 1990s, agriculture was described as the backbone of Pakistan’s economy. Pakistan’s small-holder farmers are holding up this backbone through their sweat and toil. According to IFAD, farmers who own less than 12.5 acres of land make up around 90 per cent of the country’s farmers.

This group can be viewed through two lenses: as productive members of society who are feeding the nation, and as citizens of Pakistan whose interests, livelihoods, and well-being should be prioritised by the state.

From a purely economic standpoint, smaller farms could be replaced by larger ones to enhance efficiency and optimise resource use. This is how a state and a large business should think differently in principle – people vs profit.

In the late 1960s, Pakistan’s Green Revolution introduced High Yielding Varieties (HYVs) of various crops, along with tube-well irrigation and chemical fertilizers. While this revolution was initially hailed as a success and increased agricultural productivity, it also increased inequality and led to the decline of mid-scale farmers.

I encourage everyone to read Akmal Khan’s analysis of the impact of the Green Revolution on income inequality. While the inputs of the revolution were not designed to promote inequality, Pakistan’s agrarian structure, with its unequal distribution of land ownership and widespread tenancy, created disparities.

To take part in the revolution, farmers needed resources to afford seed varieties, fertilizers, and the cost of setting up tube wells. Those with an asset base benefited, while those without were unable to compete and were driven deeper into poverty. As a result, we saw rising landlessness among the poor, with tenant evictions linked to land resumption, leading to increased social and economic dependence on large landowners.

Now picture this: instead of farmers competing within themselves you now also have a state-backed commercial giant that can easily secure access to land and use it for commercial farming. This giant has the ability to suck out or divert the water towards the land for profit. Yes, it may lead to higher productivity due to economies of scale but at what cost?

The small farmer would not be able to compete with this commercial giant and would suffer severe livelihood losses and poverty. Additionally, we will in absolute terms see our precious water resources dry up. As a region that is already climate-vulnerable, this would spell disaster, starvation, and doom for a huge set of population in the country.

Policies favouring commercial farming are often the result of a shortsighted vision for growth. As per the population census of 2010, there are 8.2 million farm families. These families are not just economic units; they are people who depend on their livelihoods for survival. We must question whose development and progress we are prioritising and whether it will harm already vulnerable segments of the population.

We absolutely need to centre people and the planet in our state-led policies and programme over profit. We need to reject the flawed rhetoric that growth and prosperity will trickle down because it is clear that they won’t. With policies that profit state-backed large-scale corporate farming, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer and the gap between them will become too large to ever fill.

There is no political space to discuss interventions like these. This is how we have gotten to really efficient, self-sustaining and profitable’ state-backed enterprises. Amid the noise of party politics, real policy concerns are being obscured. This is both dangerous and nefarious by design, and we must resist it in any way we can.

The writer is an independent policy expert.