DAWN.COM | Columnists | Motherland for sale?
In a country where land hunger is acute and hundreds of thousands of skilled cultivators have no land or are without subsistence-level holdings, the giving away of land to foreign parties or non-farming institutions or retired civil and military employees for that matter, should be considered a criminal denial of the people’s rights and their interest.
The government itself is a lessee as all land belongs to God, according to the Islamic faith, or to the state (not government), according to the official theory in Pakistan. Both restrict the government’s power to lease/sell land. Besides landless peasants have the first right on any land that is at the government’s disposal.
It is also necessary to take into consideration four unavoidable consequences of leasing land to foreign investors.
Firstly, if land already under cultivation is leased out, all those working on it, haris and field workers, face the threat of unemployment.
Secondly, we have learnt from the experience of the mustajiri system (whereby commercial entrepreneurs acquire big farms on lease) that the contractors, in their drive to maximise profits, exploit the land so ruthlessly that it loses fertility and becomes weak and sick.
Thirdly, land lease arrangements can lead to the unconscionable exploitation of physical and human resources, such as that seen in the working of timber and mining mafias in Latin America.
Finally, lessees of land acquire considerable political clout that undermines the capacity of the lesser-states to uphold their national interests.