The News (Pakistan) | Sunday, October 04, 2009
Don't shoot the messenger
By Shandana Minhas
The dailies have lately been strangely mum on the ongoing negotiations between local decision-makers and Gulf-based investors interested in a local land-grab. The euphemism for this land-grab--in which over half-a-million acres of arable land across our four provinces would be "granted" to a foreign government for cultivation to offset its own inevitable food shortages -- is "agricultural joint venture." At least that is what they have been calling it when wealthy rapacious states have snapped up land in countries like Madagascar, Sudan, Burma, Cameroon, Laos, Mozambique and Uganda in recent years. Clearly we are in august (familiar) company, with the other usual (vulnerable) suspects from the bottom of assorted development indices.
Here is how some have observed it tends to work: the bait of 'agricultural development' is dangled before a struggling economy. It is swallowed, whole, by the decision making over class under the pretext of long-term investment; there might be a greasing of palms, or the promise of collusion with the powerful might be sufficiently seductive. Contracts signed lean heavily in favour of the foreign investor, with nearly all projected produce intended for export back to the country funding its growth. Additional infrastructure development, often touted as a USP to the local populace, concentrates only on power generation, irrigation, transport and storage facilities required to ensure a smooth flow of the produce from the point of origin to its intended market. The promised transfer of technology and skills is hamstrung by the import and placement of expatriate management and technical staff. The only involvement of locals tends to be as manual farm workers who, if that, are paid at little above the going market rate and also denied means and opportunity to unionise. In return, the parasitic foreign investors reap profits, ensure a ready supply of valuable goods at subsidised rates and accumulate increased political clout in the host economy. If this sounds familiar to any of you, it is because it is reminiscent of what the Dutch East India Company used to do.
Another reason this proposed land-grab should be raising red flags as well as eyebrows is the already perilous state of Pakistan's agricultural sector. When I say perilous, I mean inequitable. The landed class continues to hold a dagger to land reform's neck. Landless "peasants" immolate themselves in front of press clubs. Children die in stampedes for grain. Haris can still be found shackled in jails between shifts. Applications for grants of arable land by would be small farmers seeking to break out of the feudal cycle languish for years in dusty offices while the military picks and chooses its orchards. Instead of plotting a long-term solution to these horrific realities, the Board of Investment or whichever acronymic idiots are behind this seeks to introduce another explosive into the mix. The only palatable benefit of catering to this latest economic power-play is that the current corrupt elite would probably have to take a step down the food chain.
There is also our own food security to consider. Now we know our government functionaries are moved enough by the impending plight of their brothers and sisters in other parts of the globe to offer them patches of our own backyard for the food they might soon face a shortage of. But what can they tell us about their plans to make sure our own people don't starve to death once water dries up and global warming really raises the temperature? What? That happens already and we've built up immunity to it and so don't really give a crap? Ok, then, onwards to other important things, though if we all gave a crap we could probably package it and export it as fertiliser for profit to a country that, in terms of sustainable development, is even worse off than we are. Like… er… never mind.
The other important things, a catchphrase from apologetic drawing room diplomacy, include notions like sovereignty and culture. Sovereignty implies a state - as an instrument of its people - has ultimate, independent control over all its territories, for the pursuit of the common good. It should be the ultimate authority, as an agent of the people, over all that is done on and to each and every bit of its land, again for the common good. It should be enough, simply, to have followed the news in recent years to get an object lesson in what happens when the state doesn't. Early news reports about the land-grab also included a line about a "special security force" to protect the leased land. Would this special security force be made up of locals or foreign nationals? Who would they be protecting the land from, exactly? Locusts? Rabid crop-eating bunnies? Protesting haris? The awam aiming for storage bins in case of food riots?
Culture imperilled might seem out of place in this context, but here is a thought. A significant percentage of the manual labour force on arable land in Pakistan is female. Women tend crops, drive livestock, walk though fields in garishly coloured clothes while humming folk ditties. (In the movies anyway, considering recent trends in violence against women they probably now walk softly and carry a big stick.) If we lease this land to Saudi Arabia -- a country where women are not allowed to drive cars, vote, work in public places with a namehram -- to do with as it pleases -- will there still, across the proposed acreage reportedly twice the size of Hong Kong, be room for them?
Of course, all of this is just idle speculation by a professional sofa-tester. In the absence of any updated information about status and process, it is devoid of the statistics and jargon about theories supplied by other columnists more familiar with that thing called balance. (Speaking of theories, who wants to buy into a fun one about how this could be a Trojan horse to furnish US troops with bases from which to pounce unexpectedly on our nukes?) It could even be called a propagandist, unfair tarring and feathering of an important ally that has done, and will hopefully continue to do, so much for us. Disgraceful, really, to suggest there should be an implied lack of good faith in ceding territory to a country that has given us, along with lots of cash, militant fundamentalism, discrimination against ordinary Asians, sanctuary for disgraced ones, camel jockeys, and the hunting to near extinction of the houbara bustard.
Tauba-tauba, etc.
Shandana Minhas is a writer. Email: [email protected]
