The government’s Agriculture Innovation and Growth Plan came into public view last week when the prime minister chaired a widely reported meeting to review its implementation (reported in this paper on August 23).
At first sight, it looks like a sensible effort. It addresses almost every dimension of agricultural modernisation – better seeds, research, mechanisation, credit, storage, crop intelligence and support for small and medium farmers – except the most important.
It asks how land can produce more, but not who owns the land, who works it, who receives the gains and how land ownership shapes political power. In short, it bypasses the structure of power within which agriculture operates. Modernisation without changing this structure may increase the value of agricultural assets but leave the distribution of power largely untouched or even reinforce it.
Worldwide experience, extensively documented and analysed and acknowledged across the ideological spectrum, from the World Bank to conservative policy institutes, suggests another path: far-reaching redistribution of agricultural land can break the power of the landlord-tenant system and prepare the ground for broader economic transformation. For example, in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, such redistribution widened ownership, raised rural incomes and demand, facilitated the movement of labour out of agriculture, encouraged investment in education and skills, and helped lay the foundations for rapid industrialisation.
The question, then, is: can Pakistan transform its agriculture without transforming the rural power structure on which it rests?
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto gave a clear answer: No. “Of all the reforms", he declared in 1972, “the most basic are the land reforms", intended to break the concentration of landed wealth and feudal power. Scholars across disciplines have reached much the same conclusion: the landed elite continues to exercise a powerful stranglehold over rural society and politics, distorting incentives, discouraging productive investment, perpetuating insecure tenancy and dependence, and holding back the transformation of agriculture itself.
Hamza Alavi showed how landed power became entwined with Pakistan’s military-bureaucratic order; Ayesha Jalal traced the landed elites cultivated by imperial rule and their decisive role after independence in shaping relations between state and society; and Imran Ali documented how British land grants and patronage deliberately strengthened the landed elite as an instrument of political control.
As land managers, however, they were, in his description, rentiers and largely ‘parasitical absentee landlords’, commonly leasing their land to subtenants on half-batai terms. The landed elite continues to resist effective land reform and democratic pressures that might erode its privileges, and finds in authoritarian rule ‘a useful substitute’ for the protection once supplied by the British.
But perhaps the most vivid indictment of Pakistan’s landed elite comes not from political economy or history, but from recent literature. Daniyal Mueenuddin captures in his novel ‘This Is Where the Serpent Lives’ what scholars describe analytically: the extraordinary reach of landed power into almost every dimension of rural life. His world shows what an official agricultural balance sheet does not: relations of dependence, the distance between proprietor and labourer, access mediated through patrons, the enormous power concentrated around estates and the way economic hierarchy spills into political and social life.
This is Mueenuddin’s serpent: larger than any individual landlord, its coils stretching across rural Pakistan, strangling enterprise, human agency and the possibility of meaningful transformation. The landed elite is its most visible embodiment, but the serpent itself is a system of inherited hierarchy, patronage, dependence, political connection and violence.
Such a system is structurally conservative because every extension of autonomy to those below it loosens one of the coils through which its power is reproduced: land redistribution makes tenants independent; education gives villagers alternatives; secure housing rights free them from eviction; universal public services eliminate the need for patrons; impartial courts restrict arbitrary power; and politics based on programs and rights replaces personal allegiance with citizenship. What appears from below as emancipation therefore appears from above as the erosion of authority.
The serpent’s power is defended through property and law, political connections, coercive institutions, patronage and clans of ‘hereditary muscle’ that serve it across generations. Wealth, political access, police power and violence thus reinforce one another, preserving an order that has lost much of its historical legitimacy and capacity to command consent but retains formidable power to punish those who test its boundaries. Its victims appear as bumps along the serpent’s length – absorbed, disciplined or crushed when they transgress the limits of the order.
Though exhausted as a historical project, it remains dangerous as a structure of domination and extraction. This is the reality the Agriculture Innovation and Growth Plan bypasses. Its proposals may improve seeds, research, technology, credit and yields, but they leave untouched the structure of power that determines how far change can go.
We cannot transform our agriculture while leaving that structure intact. Alongside measuring crops and yields, the government must begin loosening the serpent’s coils.
The writer is a freelance contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]
