17.11.2013 Vagaries of greed
Redistribution of land from ‘feudal’ parasites to hardworking small farmers would reduce poverty through asset distribution, leading to both equity and efficiency
By Muhammad Ali Jan
The struggle for redistributive land reforms, once a policy linchpin of many post-colonial states, has seen a continuous decline in the last two decades.
The decline has manifested itself both in terms of scant attention paid by national governments and international development agencies towards any serious land redistribution measures, as well as a decisive change in the social forces that were once aligned behind the land reform agenda — farmers’ movements and sympathetic political parties. Both have back-tracked on their historic commitment to a land redistribution agenda and have moved to issues of remunerative prices, water rates, fertiliser and credit policies.
This has occurred despite the fact that land distribution continues to be extremely unequal, with about five per cent of farms owning close to 35 per cent of the total cultivable area on the one hand, while 90 per cent of total farms continue to be unviable and have to rely on off-farm work wherever possible, in order to subsist.
While the attempts at land redistribution by both the Ayub and Bhutto governments in 1959 and 1972 didn’t amount to much, the death-knell for a government sanctioned land reform was sounded by the extremely reactionary judgment of the Shariat Court bench in the Qazalbash Waqf Case (PLD 1990 SC 99) which argued that land reforms were contrary to the spirit of Islam; since all property actually belonged to Allah, the state had no right to interfere with this property, let alone forcibly acquire it without compensation.
Of course, this abstract and false reasoning conveniently forgot that the current land distribution was largely the outcome of the not-so-distant past when an occupying colonial power had distributed land to powerful landholders in exchange for their loyalty — an ‘interference’ with Allah’s property, which excluded both women and lower castes from a share in land and thereby set the basis for the elitist, patriarchal and caste-ridden society we find ourselves in today.
In light of this background, the Supreme Court’s recent acceptance of Awami Workers Party’s petition, led by eminent lawyer and activist Abid Hassan Minto to reopen the Qazalbash Waqf Case and reverse the judgement by the Federal Shariat Court, is an important first step to righting a historic wrong and should be welcomed by progressives.
At the same time, there is the undeniable fact of immense socio-economic change having taken place in Pakistan since land reforms were first put on the agenda; a large and fast growing urban population, highly capital intensive pockets of agriculture, a working population that increasingly seeks employment outside farming and greater investment in the construction and service sectors by capital-holders.
This has led to serious concern from certain quarters as to the efficacy of land reforms in the completely transformed context of today.
It is, therefore, crucial to examine the historical basis for land reforms in Pakistan to asses both the changes that have taken place and to answer whether we have indeed missed the train on this front. The tentative answer is that there is definitely scope for land reforms in today’s Pakistan, but as we shall hope to demonstrate, not for the same reasons that were historically put forth.
The attraction that land reforms held for such a long time in the minds of post-colonial governments, progressive intellectuals as well as social movements had much to do with the purported solution they provided to the twin goals of equity and efficiency that had seemed almost impossible to reconcile.
The chief targets for reform were the ‘feudal’ landlords: without getting into the appropriateness of the term ‘feudal’ for Pakistan (or South Asia for that matter), what was usually meant by it were a group of large landholders, usually absentees who cultivated their lands under some form of share-cropping basis, often a 50:50 share of the crop. The arrangement was believed to be such that even without a change in the stipulated share, a tenant was barely left with enough to fulfill the consumption needs of his family, sometimes even requiring loans from landlords or moneylenders in exchange for his family’s unpaid labour to the creditor. Thus, his priority for subsistence meant he simply did not have enough surplus to think about reinvestment in land productivity.
On the other side, the landlord appropriating the tenant’s surplus was much more interested in ‘ostentatious consumption’ rather than productive investment and would spend it unproductively on various goods and services to reproduce his ‘parasitic lifestyle’ (in the words of the Land Reform Commission 1959). Since a single landlord had leased out land to several families on this arrangement, the system led to dynamic implications by dampening productivity in agriculture and reproducing the poverty of the tenant at the level of the sector as a whole.
At the same time, it was demonstrated that those farmers who cultivated their own lands had a greater incentive for improving its productivity and cultivated it more intensively. Thus, a redistribution of land from such ‘feudal’ parasites to hardworking small farmers would not only reduce poverty through asset distribution, but also lead to much greater growth and accumulation within agriculture, thereby leading to both equity and efficiency outcomes.
What seemed a vicious circle at the level of theory became ever more complicated when actual implementation at the policy level came about. The tension latent between equity and efficiency manifested in the issue of setting the landholding ceiling: while the break-up of large estates was seen as crucial for loosening the stranglehold of the landed elite, it was nonetheless important to not set the ceiling too low in order to retain agriculture as a profitable sector for investment.
Ayub’s 1959 Land Commission argued that ‘although ceilings of 500 (irrigated) and 1000 (unirrigated) acres would seem fairly large’ when viewed from a ‘social justice’ lens alone they were nonetheless ‘necessary’ in order to ‘provide incentives towards greater production’. Bhutto’s ceilings at 150 and 300 acres of irrigated and unirrigated land were based on a similar logic: as he explained to a gathering of industrialists in Karachi in 1972, the breakup of feudal holdings was essential but at the same time, ‘we have tried to preserve incentives for the continuation of agriculture as an attractive and profitable vocation for the enterprising and enlightened farmers’.
Ironically, both Ayub and Bhutto were echoing the viewpoint of liberal British colonial officers from a quarter of a century ago (exemplified by men such as Malcolm Darling, Hubert Calvert, Thorburn etc) who had presented the capitalist ‘yeoman’ farmer as the vanguard of the farming community, being superior to both the backward peasantry and the large landlords.
In a move reminiscent of the government’s current attitude towards the Taliban, a dichotomy was created between ‘good’ landlords who were modernising, profit-minded gentlemen farmers and differentiated from ‘bad’ landlords, parasitic, ostentatious and with a ‘feudal’ outlook towards the economy. The policy objective now was to give incentives to such farmers to modernise agriculture as a whole through the introduction of Green Revolution technologies such as High-Yield variety seeds, tubewells and tractors at subsidised rates.
As the issue of radically redistributing land to small farmers and the landless took a backseat to that of enhancing productivity within the existing land distribution, the government’s land and tenancy reform became nothing more than a threat, a stick with which to push the landed elite towards the carrot, that is the adoption of green revolution technologies at highly subsidised rates. Ironically, it was the same parasitic landlords of government rhetoric and policy papers, the waderas of Sindh or the zamindars of Punjab, who took up the carrot with glee and benefited immensely from it.
Today, although there has been a diffusion of this technology however uneven to small and medium farmers, it is still the rural elites that have benefited overwhelmingly from these changes, having procured more than 75 per cent of the total formal institutional credit and diversified their investment portfolios into industry and services. Therefore, from a pure economic efficiency point of view, we no longer live in the age of the ‘parasitic feudal lord’ — today’s landed elite is thoroughly profit-minded and their ostentatious lifestyles (similar to the urban elites) are sustained by their ‘economic rationality’: it would appear that the case for land reforms is thus definitively closed.
However, what such a narrow view conveniently ignores is that the alleged productivity benefits of large farms are often premised on a range of hidden and unhidden subsidies and rents that accrue to them as a result of their control over political structures. Furthermore, it refuses to engage with the more pressing question of prioritising ‘efficiency’ over social justice when it clearly fails to deliver to the poor and vulnerable.
As the experience of Pakistan and various other third world countries clearly demonstrates, the distinctive feature of economic growth in the era of liberalisation has been the decoupling of growth from decent employment generation — a combination of factors such as increased labour-saving technologies, vastly greater power and mobility of capital vis-à-vis labour, preference for investment in activities with quick returns and low job creation and the general decline in public spending by governments owing to the fiscal tyranny imposed by International Financial Institutions have all meant that lack of decent job creation (certainly not unique to the current era but greatly exacerbated by it) has turned into a crisis of employment.
As a result, the share-croppers evicted off the land by technology adopting landlords, or the small farmers seeking off-farm work due to distress caused by policy bias towards the rural elite, do not find a burgeoning industrial sector that absorbs their labour and provides decent employment, similar to the particular experience of Western European and North American industrialisation. Instead, they become part of the vast majority of working poor who reproduce themselves in increasingly insecure and oppressive employment conditions, either in waged or in the form of various survival activities, the overwhelming majority of which are part of the ‘informal sector’ where they are fragmented on the basis of gender, caste, class, religion and ethnicity.
The vast majority of these labourers, therefore, straddle the rural-urban divide without settling into either of these terrains since the urban sector is not a stepping stone towards a better settled life in the city, but a temporary abode for labour which can be pushed back to its place of origin when no longer required. According to official statistics, 75 per cent of Pakistan’s workforce is employed in such precarious jobs, while others put the number close to 90 per cent.
It is this crisis of decent employment born out of an obsession with growth, which has put the question of land redistribution back onto the agenda, this time however not as a tool for increasing productivity in agriculture but as a crucial element of a broader struggle in pursuit of social justice and dignified livelihoods for the vast majority of working poor. If the virtues of efficient large scale farming do not trickle down to the rural poor, and off-farm employment is simply not enough to guarantee a life with dignity, then the break-up of such large landholdings as a livelihood strategy for the poor must take precedence over considerations of efficiency that overwhelmingly benefit the rich. That this is not some utopian fantasy but a demand emanating from actual struggles over land in the contemporary era is clearly demonstrated through the experience of the largest social movement over land in the world: Brazil’s Landless Worker’s Movement (MST).
In one of the most heavily urbanised countries in the world (88 per cent of the population is urban), the MST has fought for access to land for the poor through a combination of legal and illegal methods, squatting over and cultivating land belonging both to the state and estate owners and evoking the clause within the Brazilian constitution of 1988 which states that property must fulfill a social function. It is largely composed of small farmers, landless rural labourers as well as retrenched workers from mines, industry and service sectors who argue that due to the government’s failure to provide decent employment, it has no right to interfere with their own efforts to attain it.
In this way they have put questions of dignity and social justice above the single-minded focus of growth without trickle down.
Finally, just as in Brazil, the blurred boundary between urban and rural in today’s context means that the land redistribution question must include both sites into one comprehensive strategy: just as it is important to keep social reproduction of the poor above technical and economic efficiency of cultivation, it is likewise important to decide whether it is justified to transform farm land into housing societies for the elite, or whether informal settlements must be razed to the ground to make way for five star hotels, shopping malls and super highways.
The imperative of social justice demands that the housing needs of the poor come before the luxury needs of the elites.
The struggles of our contemporary era are struggles over resources, with land being a principal prize in the struggle. We are currently witnessing this struggle unfold with violent consequences in Karachi and to a lesser extent in other cities of Pakistan. It is, therefore, imperative to decide what side of the divide we are on: with the principles of inclusivity, human dignity and social justice or the vagaries of private greed.
m.ali.jan985@gmail.com