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For all the hype and hoopla about agriculture being the backbone of
Pakistan's economy, it remains the retarded elder brother to other
economic sectors of the society. Farmers, large, medium or small,
remain 'captive producers' and 'captive consumers' to urban economy.
While bland statistics may provide some solace in alternating years
that agricultural productivity is keeping ahead of population growth
rates, the flesh and blood demographics in agriculture do not paint
a pretty picture.
Even by official estimates, in the 90's (called the decade of poverty),
urban poverty fell between 1990-91 and 1998-99, while rural poverty
held at about 36 percent, widening the rural-urban gap. It is widely
held that Pakistan hides its poverty in the rural areas. Obviously,
if over 60 percent of population (estimated rural) is contributing
only 25 percent to GDP it has to be at a lower threshold of income
levels. But there is hidden caveat to this too! Official statistics
do not include the informal economy, which is, by different estimates,
over 50 percent of the total economy. After adjustment is made for
this anomaly, share of agriculture sector falls to around 10 - 12
percent of the economy, because all the non-documented, informal economy
resides in the non-agrarian sectors. Agriculture sector, for all its
backwardness, is amazingly well documented, thanks to Raja Todar Mal
who established an impeccable land revenue system in the fifteenth
century that has served all rulers, including the British, since then
so admirably.
Let us look at the profile of the Pakistani farmers. Take the large
holdings first: There were three or four thousand families who inherited
large estates at partition. The Muslim Family laws of inheritance
and three consecutive land reforms have chopped their holdings to
a fraction of their ancestral dimensions. Today there are no more
than 15,000 farmers (0.3 percent) who own more than 150 acres of land
in the country; they own 10 percent of the agricultural land. All
of them, barring a handful of exceptions, are maintaining a false
standard of living by selling off lands. There are hardly any such
families, who have not sold lands to invest in lavish urban lifestyles
or urban businesses. Their next generation is either going to demote
socially to medium sized farmers or move on to business-based vocations
and education-driven employment in urban areas. Most of them are indebted
to ADBP with loans that they can only service by selling more land
or rolling over credit with connivance of local managers for as long
as they can.
The medium sized farmers - 12 to 150 acre holdings - are 19 percent
in number and hold 47 percent of agricultural land in Pakistan. These
farmers contribute the bulk of farm surplus commodities coming to
the markets. Most of them, owners or lessees, are quite commercially
oriented, relatively progressive and take farming as a serious vocation.
This class of farmers is just managing to keep its nose above the
water as rising input costs and stagnant yields yoke them down to
a cruel earth that is becoming increasingly stubborn to reward labour.
Their assets are leveraged with banks for a pittance, while they dextrously
manage to keep their cash flow rolling between increasing personal
needs and higher farm inputs. A good year brings them some disposable
income to change their vehicle or get the house repaired or get their
children married off; then a bad year rolls them back to the edge
of subsistence. A typical medium sized farmer looks weather-beaten,
prematurely aged, humble yet dignified with a sublime grace that comes
of a clean and honest source of livelihood - almost an anti-thesis
of his urban counterpart, the medium sized businessman who carries
the airs of a well-fed and smug animal. The medium size farmers have
to run very hard to stay put. As the value of their lands depreciates
relative to urban properties their net worth is eroding away like
sand banks crumbling into the river. A 50 acre farm will not buy a
shop in an urban city centre today.
The small farmers - below 12 acres - are 79 percent in numbers and
own 53 percent of total agricultural lands; they are the salt of the
earth, the beasts of burden, the children of a lesser God. They dwell
perpetually below the poverty line. Disenfranchised in almost every
way in the society, except as election fodder, they subsist off livestock
or employment in urban suburbs. Most of their production is for self-consumption.
Their land is not an economically productive unit; it is an abode
that provides shelter, basic food materials and fuel sources. It's
a rural mooring that keeps them from the terrible fate of migrating
to the city where life is hazardous and uncertain. Increasingly family
members seek employment outside and return home after days work to
huddle up together by the cooking fires. Their farm inputs are provided
by informal money lending village shylocks since formal credit is
inaccessible to them. Their low incomes are exacerbated by lack of
social services like education, sanitation and health. Their security
is tethered to a loyalty towards a village warlord who can summon
free labour out of them on order. With no past and a sordid present,
they can not afford a vision of the future. Unplanned breeding comes
to them as naturally as breathing. Their subsistence approach to production
is wasteful of resources. Today 15 percent of land and water resources
are deployed in fodder production for their low productivity animals.
At this rate in 20 years, it will increase to 30 percent. Then it
would be a hard choice between starving the animals and starving humans.
This picture is far removed from the placid view that emerges out
of statistical tables that planners ponder over. At the human level,
demographics and psychographics are highly skewed.
Many developing countries have made the transition from feudal-agrarian
heritage to commercially driven agricultural economies, as the Europeans
did three hundred years ago; Chile, Brazil, Turkey, China, Egypt,
Morocco and, to a large extent, India are doing so today. What has
kept Pakistan in medieval times? With natural resources equivalent
to California, Pakistan is barely managing to hobble along the path
to self-reliance let alone turning into a breadbasket for food and
fibre importing countries around the world.
In the following column I will look at the whole range of failures,
from the holistic picture to micro elements that stultify Pakistan's
immense agricultural potential. We will visit the sequence of reasons
that has created a system whereby capital and human resources continuously
drain out of the agricultural sector to industrial/urban sectors;
where economic priorities build in resource transfers through policies;
where land and water resources are straight-jacketed into inflexible
hereditary and equity paradigms, impeding natural development of land
and water markets; where governments consider spending on rural infrastructures
a matter of socio-political largesse rather than productive investments.
Virtually all farmers are in agriculture by accident of birth. I have
the unique distinction of being one of the few who adopted agriculture
as a matter of conscious choice for twenty three years. And I was
the first to bale out as a matter of economic survival. By this, I
feel that I have earned enough credentials to make some educated comments
about the distorted demographics (and psychographics) of the sector
that I intend to do in the next column.
Iqbal Mustafa
1220 words
29 October 2004
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