Land For Landless Women in Pakistan

The PPP-led Sindh government is granting over 212,864 acres of government-owned agriculture land to landless peasants in the province.

Over half of the farm land being given is prime nehri (land irrigated by canals) farm land, and the rest being barani or rain-dependent. About 70 percent of the 5,800 beneficiaries of this gift are women. Other provincial governments, especially the Punjab government have also announced land allotment for women, for which initial surveys are underway, according to ActionAid Pakistan.

The land is high-risk government land that runs alongside rivers and tributaries. It was previously designated as government-owned flood runoff, but was used by local landlords.

The initiative includes various RSPs (Rural Support Programs) to develop support packages for availability of water and other inputs such as seed and fertilizer. Depending on geographic contiguity, the beneficiaries will be organized in cooperative mode for enabling them to access agricultural implements, farm machinery and micro credit on collective basis. The government will provide support for at least a period of two years through an institutional support mechanism for enabling each household to move to a level where they are able to generate sustainable living.

Here are the stories of how the lives of two women beneficiaries of land distribution are changing for the better as reported by various media:

Oxfam Report:

Mother of five, Sodhi Solangi, can’t stop smiling as she shows me her new eight acre plot of land. Cotton crops are growing and, a little further away, building work is almost finished on a large new house overlooking the fields where her family will soon settle.



Just a few years ago, 42 year old Sodhi, who lives in Ramzan Village, Umerkot district, in Sindh, Pakistan, was landless. She and her husband used to work on others’ lands, earning a share of the crops as payment. Daily life was a struggle.

“We often had problems”, Sodhi recalled. “Sometimes we had money, sometimes not. It was very hard for us. We’d spend all our days working on someone else’s farm and our children would be at home.

“We wore torn clothes. But now things are very different. When you like something, you can go out and buy it. Before, we would have to ask the landlord to give us money if we wanted anything, but now we have money in our hands and we can buy things whenever we want.”

“Now we have our own land and are working on our own land. It feels so good when we work there. When we used to work for others, we would have to drag ourselves there.”

Her family’s luck changed when Sodhi was awarded eight acres of land, under a programme run by Sindh’s provincial government, which in 2008 began redistributing swathes of state-held land to landless women peasants. The landmark scheme was an attempt to lift more people out of poverty in the province, where more than two-thirds of the population work the land, but where bonded labour is still widely practiced and most land is still held by wealthy and political influential elites.

Sohdi and her family grew wheat and cotton on their new land. And they managed to earn enough profit to buy another eight acres.

“We were so happy when we go our land. Now, things are so different”, said Sodhi. “Whenever we want to eat anything, we can just buy it. Before, we used to eat dal and potatoes. Now we can buy all sorts of things – mangos, even chicken.”

“Everyday, we have a lot of food. It’s like a festival of food for us every time!” she said, laughing.

Christian Science Monitor:

When the fields are cleared, Nimat Khatoon, a 50-something peasant farmer who has worked for the wealthy owner of these fields since her childhood has something worth the wait: a four-acre slice of land to call her own.

"It's something I couldn't dream of seeing in my lifetime. We're so happy," she says with a toothy grin, as her children play around her home made of wooden slats and a thatched roof.
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Khatoon's family still owes some 40,000 rupees ($470) to the landlord her family has worked under for generations – a princely sum, which could still take another year to clear – though thanks to her newly acquired land, she's hopeful that for the first time ever, the cycle of debt won't begin afresh next year.

As expected, the rich landlords are fighting back by making threats of violence and by filing legal challenges via local peasants in their employ, to take back land that was in their de facto control. Sharaeefa Gulfazar, a recipient of 4.5 acres of land, told Oxfam's Caroline Gluck: “The landlord sent officials to threaten the women here saying, "We will destroy your homes and take your tractors". He also threatened to send the police to our home”.

The women, however, are also receiving help from various NGOs and activist groups to assert their rights. An example of this is Participatory Development Initiatives (PDI) who are fighting through the courts for the women.

Farm land has long been the main source of wealth in rural Pakistan, and the allocation of land to women is a powerful symbol of women empowerment. Genuine implementation of the good intentions of the Sindh government initiative is an absolute must to send a message in patriarchal society that women deserve higher status in society to ensure a brighter future for all of Pakistan.


Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Status of Women in Pakistan

Pakistan's Rural Economy

Fighting Poverty Through Microfinance in Pakistan

Ode to Feudal Prince of Pakistan

Who Owns Pakistan?

Pakistan: Helping the landless become landowners

Feudal Slavery Survives in South Asia

Owning Land is a Distant Dream For Many

Agriculture and Textiles Employ Most Indians and Pakistanis

Female Literacy Lags Far Behind in South Asia

India's Rising Population and Depleting Resources

India is expected to surpass China as the world's most populous nation by 2025. As the Indian population rises rapidly amidst its depleting land and water resources, the widespread hunger problem could grow worse unless serious steps are taken now to remedy the situation.





The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) reported last year that hunger in India has grown over the last three years.



IFPRI said India's hunger index score has worsened over the last three years from 23.7 to 23.9 to 24.1 and its ranking moved from 66 to 65 to 67 on a list of 84 nations....while Pakistan's hunger index score has improved over the same period reported since 2008 from 21.7 (2008) to 21.0 (2009) to 19.1 (2010) and its ranking has risen from 61 to 58 to 52.



In 2011, the situation in India is only getting worse with double-digit food inflation and growing shortages of basics like onions.

With the growing population and worsening water shortages, the prognosis for hunger in India is not good, according to the author of National Geographics cover story in its latest issue on population.

India is ranked 33rd and Pakistan 39th among the most overcrowded nations of the world by Overpopulation Index published by the Optimum Population Trust based in the United Kingdom. The index measures overcrowding based on the size of the population and the resources available to sustain it.

India has a dependency percentage of 51.6 per cent on other nations and an ecological footprint of 0.77. The index calculates that India is overpopulated by 594.32 million people. Pakistan has a dependency percentage of 49.9 per cent on other nations and an ecological footprint of 0.75. The index calculates that Pakistan is overpopulated by 80 million people. Pakistan is less crowded than China (ranked 29), India (ranked 33) and the US (ranked 35), according to the index. Singapore is the most overcrowded and Bukina Faso the least on a list of 77 nations assessed by the Optimum Population Trust.



Here are some excerpts from National Geographics' cover story "7 Billion and Counting":

In 1966, when Ehrlich took that taxi ride, there were around half a billion Indians. There are 1.2 billion now. Delhi’s population has increased even faster, to around 22 million, as people have flooded in from small towns and villages and crowded into sprawling shantytowns. Early last June in the stinking hot city, the summer monsoon had not yet arrived to wash the dust from the innumerable construction sites, which only added to the dust that blows in from the deserts of Rajasthan. On the new divided highways that funnel people into the unplanned city, oxcarts were heading the wrong way in the fast lane. Families of four cruised on motorbikes, the women’s scarves flapping like vivid pennants, toddlers dangling from their arms. Families of a dozen or more sardined themselves into buzzing, bumblebee-colored auto rickshaws designed for two passengers. In the stalled traffic, amputees and wasted little children cried for alms. Delhi today is boomingly different from the city Ehrlich visited, and it is also very much the same.




At Lok Nayak Hospital, on the edge of the chaotic and densely peopled nest of lanes that is Old Delhi, a human tide flows through the entrance gate every morning and crowds inside on the lobby floor. “Who could see this and not be worried about the population of India?” a surgeon named Chandan Bortamuly asked one afternoon as he made his way toward his vasectomy clinic. “Population is our biggest problem.” Removing the padlock from the clinic door, Bortamuly stepped into a small operating room. Inside, two men lay stretched out on examination tables, their testicles poking up through holes in the green sheets. A ceiling fan pushed cool air from two window units around the room.

Bortamuly is on the front lines of a battle that has been going on in India for nearly 60 years. In 1952, just five years after it gained independence from Britain, India became the first country to establish a policy for population control. Since then the government has repeatedly set ambitious goals—and repeatedly missed them by a mile. A national policy adopted in 2000 called for the country to reach the replacement fertility of 2.1 by 2010. That won’t happen for at least another decade. In the UN’s medium projection, India’s population will rise to just over 1.6 billion people by 2050. “What’s inevitable is that India is going to exceed the population of China by 2030,” says A. R. Nanda, former head of the Population Foundation of India, an advocacy group. “Nothing less than a huge catastrophe, nuclear or otherwise, can change that.”

Sterilization is the dominant form of birth control in India today, and the vast majority of the procedures are performed on women. The government is trying to change that; a no-scalpel vasectomy costs far less and is easier on a man than a tubal ligation is on a woman. In the operating theater Bortamuly worked quickly. “They say the needle pricks like an ant bite,” he explained, when the first patient flinched at the local anesthetic. “After that it’s basically painless, bloodless surgery.” Using the pointed tip of a forceps, Bortamuly made a tiny hole in the skin of the scrotum and pulled out an oxbow of white, stringy vas deferens—the sperm conduit from the patient’s right testicle. He tied off both ends of the oxbow with fine black thread, snipped them, and pushed them back under the skin. In less than seven minutes—a nurse timed him—the patient was walking out without so much as a Band-Aid. The government will pay him an incentive fee of 1,100 rupees (around $25), a week’s wages for a laborer.

The Indian government tried once before to push vasectomies, in the 1970s, when anxiety about the population bomb was at its height. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay used state-of-emergency powers to force a dramatic increase in sterilizations. From 1976 to 1977 the number of operations tripled, to more than eight million. Over six million of those were vasectomies. Family planning workers were pressured to meet quotas; in a few states, sterilization became a condition for receiving new housing or other government benefits. In some cases the police simply rounded up poor people and hauled them to sterilization camps.

The excesses gave the whole concept of family planning a bad name. “Successive governments refused to touch the subject,” says Shailaja Chandra, former head of the National Population Stabilisation Fund (NPSF). Yet fertility in India has dropped anyway, though not as fast as in China, where it was nose-diving even before the draconian one-child policy took effect. The national average in India is now 2.6 children per woman, less than half what it was when Ehrlich visited. The southern half of the country and a few states in the northern half are already at replacement fertility or below.

In Kerala, on the southwest coast, investments in health and education helped fertility fall to 1.7. The key, demographers there say, is the female literacy rate: At around 90 percent, it’s easily the highest in India. Girls who go to school start having children later than ones who don’t. They are more open to contraception and more likely to understand their options.


SO FAR THIS APPROACH, held up as a model internationally, has not caught on in the poor states of northern India—in the “Hindi belt” that stretches across the country just south of Delhi. Nearly half of India’s population growth is occurring in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh, where fertility rates still hover between three and four children per woman. More than half the women in the Hindi belt are illiterate, and many marry well before reaching the legal age of 18. They gain social status by bearing children—and usually don’t stop until they have at least one son.

As an alternative to the Kerala model, some point to the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, where sterilization “camps”—temporary operating rooms often set up in schools—were introduced during the ’70s and where sterilization rates have remained high as improved hospitals have replaced the camps. In a single decade beginning in the early 1990s, the fertility rate fell from around three to less than two. Unlike in Kerala, half of all women in Andhra Pradesh remain illiterate.

Amarjit Singh, the current executive director of the NPSF, calculates that if the four biggest states of the Hindi belt had followed the Andhra Pradesh model, they would have avoided 40 million births—and considerable suffering. “Because 40 million were born, 2.5 million children died,” Singh says. He thinks if all India were to adopt high-quality programs to encourage sterilizations, in hospitals rather than camps, it could have 1.4 billion people in 2050 instead of 1.6 billion.

Critics of the Andhra Pradesh model, such as the Population Foundation’s Nanda, say Indians need better health care, particularly in rural areas. They are against numerical targets that pressure government workers to sterilize people or cash incentives that distort a couple’s choice of family size. “It’s a private decision,” Nanda says.

In Indian cities today, many couples are making the same choice as their counterparts in Europe or America. Sonalde Desai, a senior fellow at New Delhi’s National Council of Applied Economic Research, introduced me to five working women in Delhi who were spending most of their salaries on private-school fees and after-school tutors; each had one or two children and was not planning to have more. In a nationwide survey of 41,554 households, Desai’s team identified a small but growing vanguard of urban one-child families. “We were totally blown away at the emphasis parents were placing on their children,” she says. “It suddenly makes you understand—that is why fertility is going down.” Indian children on average are much better educated than their parents.

That’s less true in the countryside. With Desai’s team I went to Palanpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh—a Hindi-belt state with as many people as Brazil. Walking into the village we passed a cell phone tower but also rivulets of raw sewage running along the lanes of small brick houses. Under a mango tree, the keeper of the grove said he saw no reason to educate his three daughters. Under a neem tree in the center of the village, I asked a dozen farmers what would improve their lives most. “If we could get a little money, that would be wonderful,” one joked.

The goal in India should not be reducing fertility or population, Almas Ali of the Population Foundation told me when I spoke to him a few days later. “The goal should be to make the villages livable,” he said. “Whenever we talk of population in India, even today, what comes to our mind is the increasing numbers. And the numbers are looked at with fright. This phobia has penetrated the mind-set so much that all the focus is on reducing the number. The focus on people has been pushed to the background.”

It was a four-hour drive back to Delhi from Palanpur, through the gathering night of a Sunday. We sat in traffic in one market town after another, each one hopping with activity that sometimes engulfed the car. As we came down a viaduct into Moradabad, I saw a man pushing a cart up the steep hill, piled with a load so large it blocked his view. I thought of Ehrlich’s epiphany on his cab ride all those decades ago. People, people, people, people—yes. But also an overwhelming sense of energy, of striving, of aspiration.
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Some parts of it may well be; some parts of it are hellish today. There are now 21 cities with populations larger than ten million, and by 2050 there will be many more. Delhi adds hundreds of thousands of migrants each year, and those people arrive to find that “no plans have been made for water, sewage, or habitation,” says Shailaja Chandra. Dhaka in Bangladesh and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are 40 times larger today than they were in 1950. Their slums are filled with desperately poor people who have fled worse poverty in the countryside.
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The World Bank has predicted that by 2030 more than a billion people in the developing world will belong to the “global middle class,” up from just 400 million in 2005. That’s a good thing. But it will be a hard thing for the planet if those people are eating meat and driving gasoline-powered cars at the same rate as Americans now do. It’s too late to keep the new middle class of 2030 from being born; it’s not too late to change how they and the rest of us will produce and consume food and energy. “Eating less meat seems more reasonable to me than saying, ‘Have fewer children!’ ” Le Bras says.

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For centuries population pessimists have hurled apocalyptic warnings at the congenital optimists, who believe in their bones that humanity will find ways to cope and even improve its lot. History, on the whole, has so far favored the optimists, but history is no certain guide to the future. Neither is science. It cannot predict the outcome of People v. Planet, because all the facts of the case—how many of us there will be and how we will live—depend on choices we have yet to make and ideas we have yet to have. We may, for example, says Cohen, “see to it that all children are nourished well enough to learn in school and are educated well enough to solve the problems they will face as adults.” That would change the future significantly.

The debate was present at the creation of population alarmism, in the person of Rev. Thomas Malthus himself. Toward the end of the book in which he formulated the iron law by which unchecked population growth leads to famine, he declared that law a good thing: It gets us off our duffs. It leads us to conquer the world. Man, Malthus wrote, and he must have meant woman too, is “inert, sluggish, and averse from labour, unless compelled by necessity.” But necessity, he added, gives hope:

“The exertions that men find it necessary to make, in order to support themselves or families, frequently awaken faculties that might otherwise have lain for ever dormant, and it has been commonly remarked that new and extraordinary situations generally create minds adequate to grapple with the difficulties in which they are involved.”

Seven billion of us soon, nine billion in 2045. Let’s hope that Malthus was right about our ingenuity.

Here's a video of Stratfor's analysis of India's demographics challenges:




Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Seven Billion and Counting

NPR Discussion on 7 Billion and Counting

South Asia's Rising Population and Declining Resources

Environmental Degradation at Siachen
Climate Change Worsens Poverty in India

World's Biggest Polluters

Global Warming Impact on Pakistan

Indian Rural Poverty Worsens
Climate Change Impact on Karachi, South Asian Megacities

Water Scarcity in Pakistan
Syeda Hamida of Indian Planning Commission Says India Worse Than Pakistan and Bangladesh

Global Hunger Index Report 2009

Grinding Poverty in Resurgent India
Food, Clothing and Shelter For All

India's Family Health Survey
Hunger and Undernutrition Blog

Pakistan's Total Sanitation Campaign
Is India a Nutritional Weakling?
Asian Gains in World's Top Universities

India's Vulnerability to Climate Change

South Asia Slipping in Human Development
What Does Democracy Deliver in Pakistan

Do South Asian Slums Offer Hope?

Pakistan's Farmland Controversey

Pakistan is seriously pushing ahead with a plan to sell or lease over 700,000 acres of agricultural land to foreign investors in the face of growing opposition at home. A Saudi delegation is due in the country this month for further talks on a plan to lease an area of land more than twice the size of Hong Kong, a Pakistani official told Reuters this month. Similar reports have surfaced earlier, indicating UAE investors have been quietly buying Pakistani farm land.

In June, news agency Reuters reported that the government of Pakistan had offered 404,700 hectares (ha) of farmland for sale or lease to foreign investors. It is the usual suspects of the Gulf states and South Korea who are the likely targets of the government's drive for investment. Oil rich, food poor states from the Middle East and food deficit prone South Korea have been spurred by the high food prices of 2007 and 2008 to increase their food security by investing in agricultural land abroad.

Also in June 2009, Swedish multi-national food company Tetra Pak announced the signing of an memorandum of understanding with local company Engro Foods to create a dairy hub in the Sahiwal district of the Punjab. The hub will serve 15 villages in the district and aims to promote more efficient production and bring smallholders into the formal dairy market chain.

In July, the Pakistani minister for investment said that the country would be happy to provide land for Korean companies to build food and dairy processing facilities, according to Pakistan Agribusiness Report. Also in July, the chief minister of the Punjab said that there was a large amount of interest in investing in the province's agriculture from Qatar.

It is not just Arab states that are buying up farm land in other nations. China secured the right to grow palm oil for biofuel on 2.8m hectares of Congo, which would be the world’s largest palm-oil plantation. It is negotiating to grow biofuels on 2m hectares in Zambia, a country where Chinese farms are said to produce a quarter of the eggs sold in the capital, Lusaka. According to one estimate, 1m Chinese farm workers will be working in Africa this year, reports the Economist.

In order to assess the situation and develop serious policy recommendations, it is important to have a basic understanding of how Pakistan's agriculture sector operates. Here are some of the important facts about it:

1. Feudal Land Ownership and Farm Productivity: The size of Pakistan's total arable land is about 22 million hectares (1 hectare=2.47 acres), the 15th largest in the world. Most of the best farm land is held by feudal landowners who use poor sharecroppers or illiterate tenant farmers to cultivate their land. As a result of the nation's landowning system, not only are the landholdings in Pakistan much larger than almost all of Pakistan's neighbors (average farm is Pakistan is about 10 acres vs only 4.5 acres in India), but the productivity and crop yields have been neglected by the absentee landlords. In spite of the massive public investments in building the irrigation and support infrastructure for Pakistan's farm sector and expensive incentives such as no taxation of farm income, Pakistan's farm productivity has been lagging, turning Pakistan from a food-surplus nation to a food-deficit nation in the last sixty years.

2. Water Scarcity: With only about 1000 cubic meters per person per year water resources, Pakistan is a water-scarce country. Out of the 169,384 billion cubic meters of water withdrawn since 2000, 96% were has been for agricultural purposes, leaving 2% for domestic and another 2% for industrial use. By far the most water is used for irrigated agriculture. With the world's largest contiguous irrigation system, Pakistan has harnessed the Indus River to transform 35.7 million acres for cultivation in otherwise arid conditions. Yet,the sector contributes less than 20% of the Pakistan's GDP and Pakistan remains a food-deficit nation. Rather than flood irrigation used in Pakistani agriculture, there is a need to explore the use of drip or spray irrigation to make better use of nation's scarce water resources before it is too late. As a first step toward improving efficiency, Pakistan government has launched a 1.3 billion U.S. dollar drip irrigation program that could help reduce water waste over the next five years. Early results are encouraging. "We installed a model drip irrigation system here that was used to irrigate cotton and the experiment was highly successful. The cotton yield with drip irrigation ranged 1,520 kg to 1,680 kg per acre compared to 960 kg from the traditional flood irrigation method," according to Wajid Ishaq, a junior scientist at the Nuclear Institute for Agriculture and Biology (NIAB).

3. Growing Urbanization Trend: Pakistan is already the most urbanized nation in South Asia where the farm sector contributes about 20% of the GDP, less than the 27% contribution by the industrial sector and the rest by service sector. And as the urbanization process accelerates, the farming techniques, emphasis on water-saving irrigation methods and productivity need to increase significantly to feed the growing population with fewer farmers.

If the foreign investors bring modernization to Pakistani farms, then the interest by foreign investors is worth considering. But the leases must be written up to ensure significant investment in the land and water management techniques, as well as much higher farm productivity benchmarks with the first right of refusal to the harvest given to Pakistanis.

A carefully crafted lease arrangement with foreign investors can accomplish the following:

1. Industrialization: Transform Pakistan from the traditional feudal society to an industrial society with modern agribusiness capable of not only feeding its growing population, but exporting surplus to add to the much-needed foreign exchange stream of earnings.

2.Productivity Enhancement: Increase productivity and improve Pakistan’s food security. There is significant room for increasing farm productivity in Pakistan. For example, Ahmed, Chaudhry and Iqbal of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics argue that per hectare wheat yield in Pakistan can be raised from about 2000-2500 kg to about 3500 kg with improved farming inputs and techniques. Since Mexico and Pakistan are located in analogous ecological zones, the introduction of Mexican varieties of high-yielding wheat by American agronomist Norman Borlaug in the country in sixties ushered an era of green revolution. But unfortunately the pace of development has not been maintained and Pakistan now lags significantly behind the Mexican yields, who are producing 3900 kg of wheat grain per hectare as compared to 2491 kg for Pakistan in the year 1999, the best season in recent memory. According to FAO data reported by Pakissan.com, among spring wheat growing countries Egypt has the highest yield, producing 5422 kg of grain per hectare and Indian Punjab produces 4090 kg versus 2500 kg per hectare in Pakistan.

3. Public Revenue Enhancement: Grow Pakistan’s tax base from the annual leases and the farm income tax received from foreign investors. This additional revenue can help boost spending on the critical education and health care programs to develop Pakistan's lagging human resources.

The terms for any land lease agreements must protect the best interest of all Pakistani stakeholder, including the farm workers, farmers, the domestic consumers, local communities, and ensure improved food security for Pakistanis and the protection of the land, water resources and the environment, while helping the foreign investors meet their basic objectives of food security in their nations.

In my view, it is not a good idea to summarily dismiss foreign investor interest in leasing farm land and investing in Pakistan's agriculture sector. What is important is to carefully assess the opportunity and come up with the best possible terms for such an arrangement to be mutually beneficial to both parties. Joachim von Braun, the head of IFPRI, argues that the best way to resolve the conflicts and create “a win-win” is for foreign investors to sign a code of conduct to improve the terms of the deals for locals. Various international bodies have been working on their versions of such a code, including the African Union, which is due to ratify one at a summit this year.

While I do think some skepticism is justified here, doing nothing is not an option. Pakistan faces potentially severe food and water shortages in satisfying the needs of its growing population. Significant investments are urgently required to avert potential famines and droughts. The best course of action now is to try and pressurize Pakistan's leadership and negotiating team to proceed cautiously and craft the best possible terms for a few pilot deals they can to ensure Pakistanis' food security and looking after Pakistan's best long term interests, while offering reasonably attractive returns to investors.

Related Links:

Foreign Investors Buying Pakistani Farm Land

Is Leasing Agricultural Land to Foreigners a Good Idea?

Pakistan's Sugar Crisis and Dietary Habits

Wheat Research and Development in Pakistan

Pakistan's Water Crisis

Wheat Productivity, Efficiency and Sustainability

Agrarian Reform in Pakistan

Urbanization in Pakistan

Pakistan Agribusiness Report 2009

Pakistan to Lease 700,000 Acres to Arab States

Pakistan's Total Arable Land