With Pakistans agricultural heartland destroyed by the catastrophic floods, the issue of food security looms large. One need only venture out into Pakistans rural areas where the reality of the countrys blight becomes overwhelming.
In the wake of the flood, the time has come for some radical rethinking. Wide-ranging agrarian reforms are desperately required which give a central role to the redistribution of large areas of productive land to the rural poor. Land reform must form a central part in the governments poverty alleviation strategy for the millions of vulnerable Pakistanis.
In order to protect the poor from food inflation, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has recommended the introduction of targeted subsidies to low income groups as well as regulation against the cartelisation and hoarding of food items. The SBP has also recommended the imposition of a higher tariff on imported luxury food items to recover part of this proposed subsidy. According to the SBP analysis of price statistics in recent years, food inflation remained higher than non-food inflation, irrespective of the levels of inflation.
In a wider context, Pakistans food security crisis is part of a chilling global trend as international sugar and rice prices have soared to record levels. According to the Reuters-Jefferies commodity price indicator, international wheat and maize prices recently spiked by almost 30% while meat prices are at 20-year highs. The spiralling cost of tomatoes in Pakistan is matched by similarly steep prices in Egypt and China.
According to the World Bank, volatility in food prices is expected to continue for the next five years. In a report released earlier this year, the World Bank stated that the number of people who go to bed hungry each night has risen from 830 million to more than 1 billion over the past three years.
This trend is particularly disturbing for Pakistan and South Asia as a whole where more than half the population is employed by the agricultural sector and this proportion of the population spends roughly half of their income on food.
The need for Pakistan to implement institutional reforms in its agricultural sector, the mainstay of its economy, has become more urgent than ever. The abject failure of successive governments to comprehensively address the issue of land reform has led to the continuation of feudal landholding structures which only serve to perpetuate poverty, iniquity, injustice and agricultural inefficiency.
In 2000, 63% of Pakistans rural poor were landless with 74% in central Punjab and 71% in Balochistan disenfranchised. Pakistan must launch a vigorous programme to increase access to land for the poor. The computerisation of property rights to clarify land ownership and ensure effective agricultural taxation is a step in the right direction but the dismantling of feudal structures and the redistribution of land from rich landlords to the poor remains of utmost importance.
Such a land reallocation programme would radically alter the countrys political landscape where the preponderant role of the feudal has gravely undermined Pakistans democratic process. In the feudal realm, vigilante justice and indentured servitude are features of everyday life. The majority of people within these vast feudal estates languish as virtual serfs, precluded from owning land, while a handful of landowners are made extremely wealthy from their control of productive agricultural land. Regrettably, the feudal lord is still the sole source of worldly power and protection for the impoverished multitudes of peasants.
Pakistan can learn from the Vietnamese experience where through a dynamic agricultural policy, Vietnam was transformed from a food deficit nation into one of South East Asias top food exporting countries. A critical factor in Vietnams success was the countrys ability to rid itself of the deeply entrenched feudalism introduced by French colonisers.
Dispossessed, dislodged, and deprived of land and cattle, Pakistans rural population will continue to sink ever deeper into serfdom unless steps for agrarian reform are not taken. Sadly, previous efforts to abolish the monopolistic privileges of the feudal have been systematically thwarted. The stark reality is that unless Pakistan is able to free itself from the clutches of feudalism, the days of unremitting poverty for millions of Pakistanis will continue and the chasm between the profligate elite and dirt poor will widen further.
