Agri reforms

EDITORIAL: The prime minister’s deadline of two days for relevant ministries to hammer out comprehensive plans to ‘reform the agriculture sector on an emergency basis in order to increase agricultural production, reduce imports of agricultural products, and improve the livelihood of the farming community in the country’ is clearly unreasonably tight.

Yet so clear is all that is wrong with this sector that it’s still not very hard to predict what those recommendations will look like. It’s for a reason, after all, that we’ve moved very fast from a self-sufficient, agri-surplus country to one that imports a bulk of even its staple food.

You couldn’t squander a natural, comparative advantage more mercilessly if you wanted to. Yet here we stand, with administration after administration vowing to sort it out and restore our agri self-sufficiency with practically nothing to show for it.

You can bet that at the top of the list is going to be technology, rather lack of it, which has led to a decline in quality of produce, loss of export markets (because of decline in quality) and hence an erosion of output and revenue.

It’s not just that no government has made the kind of effort that is needed to trigger a shift from medieval agri practices to modern technology, nor spent nearly the money that is required for it, it’s also that much of the farming community remains resistant to such change.

But that only brings us back to the lack of an overarching narrative that will push this transformation forward. Governments like to talk about these problems, and they love to sprinkle subsidies where they deliver very short-term results at best, but the structural status quo remains firmly in place.

Now we’ve lagged so far behind that even value-added textile exporters are forced to import a good 60 percent of their cotton because the local variety is just not good enough in terms of quality. And things wouldn’t have looked like this if we had had the good sense to route some of those subsidies to investments in technology so we could have had the kind of irrigation systems and seed quality that are necessary to stay competitive in the modern market.

There’s also the other medieval trend of a lot of land belonging to very few families that refuses to change. Estimates suggest that about two percent of agri families control almost 45 percent of it. Let’s not forget, of course, that a lot of these gentlemen have populated parliament for most of Pakistan’s independent life.

So there’s never been any danger of anybody enacting the kind of legislation that forces land reforms. That’s why there’s so much weight in the argument that the original West Pakistan, which is modern day state of Pakistan, wasn’t as heavily agri endowed as the eastern wing, neither did it opt for the kind of political structure that would ever allow land reforms.

In any normally functioning democracy you’d expect an 11-party ruling alliance to have the rare opportunity to bulldoze necessary reforms. But not here. Because the wide political spread in government also means that much more feudal representation and influence, which guarantees that nothing is going to change easily. That also, in part, explains why nobody is officially interested in doing something to make the provincial agri tax collection system more realistic and efficient.

Therefore, while the PM’s efforts and intentions are equally appreciated, it would help if he had an idea about how many times such things have been tried. No doubt the agri sector needs a very desperate reset, but who will make sure that we’re not about to waste yet more time and money, all over again, just to go round in circles.

If the PM really means what he said when he gave the order, then he really has his work cut out for him. For, he will not just need an A-grade team around him to sift through the proposals, but he’ll also need to personally monitor the timeline. And he will, whether he and his allies like it or not, have to say something about land reforms. Otherwise, there will be no real agri reform.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022