Huge imbalance in the ownership of agricultural land in Pakistan

ALMOST half of all agri-culture land in Pakistan is owned by just two per cent of its farmers.

That leaves the country’s 7.4 million small holders to work the remaining 55 per cent of farmland – with each on average having just 12.5 acres.

The imbalance in land owner-ship is being blamed for Pakistan’s poor agriculture performance, with growth sit-ting around 2-3 per cent over the past few decades – with crop and livestock yields lower than other comparable countries.

As a result much less produce is exported than could be the case and the country needs to import products that realistically could be supplied by the home market.

Daud Khan, a retired UN staff member based in Rome, writing for Pakistan’s Express Tribune, said the skewed land holding pattern translated directly into major imbalances in power, access to government services, and to other productive re-sources such as water, credit and technology.

“For example, irrigation water

flows disproportionately to larg-

er farmers who often overuse or even waste water while small holders, especially those

located at the tail end of irrigation channels, get little and unreliable water,” he said.

“Public services, such as those for animal heath, are often provided free and on a priority basis to large farmers and commercial dairy units while small livestock holders have to ‘incentivise’ government animal health workers to visit their sick animals.

“Government subsidies mostly go to large farmers and credit flows predominantly to big landlords, commercial livestock units and processing units.

“These inequities not only lead to poor overall performance but also high levels of rural poverty with severe consequences on the well-being of large swathes of the population.”

Climate change would only make the situation worse, he said. Mr Khan suggested one way forward for Pakistan was to encourage people to move out of rural areas – a trend seen in many rapidly growing Asian countries – allowing for the consolidation of land into larger and more efficient farms.

“These provide better incomes to those who remain, and allows them to save and invest in productivity enhancement,” he said.

However, with too few manu-facturing jobs in the cities, Mr Khan said it was difficult to see a rapid fall in the 38 per cent of the population currently engaged in agriculture.

Instead, the Pakistan govern-ment should be seeking to reform agriculture in the country to raise productivity levels among small holders, he argued.

“At present there has been a tendency to adopt restrictive domestic and foreign trade policies, which lock producers into a handful of products that are considered strategically important such as wheat, cotton, sugar and rice.

“Other products such as fruits, vegetable, pulses, oilseeds and livestock – for which demand is growing in domestic and export markets – are largely ignored,” he said.

Yields among small farmers are a fraction of those on research stations and well below those of larger farmers, said Mr Khan.

He concluded: “Agriculture, particularly small holder agri-culture, is the only way we can make progress on national development goals.

“The government must give due attention both to the reform agenda as well as to design, and above all to the implementation of projects and programmes.”