20000101

'Rural population has

inadequate access to

land'

ARSHAD AWAN

KARACHI: Despite the relatively high average farm size, Pakistan has been suffering from the problems of uneconomic holdings and strikingly uneven farm sizes, an expert said on Friday.

"Pakistan's average farm size of 9.4 acres compares favourably with other South Asian countries, including India, where the average farm size is 4.2 acres, and Sri Lanka, where the average non-plantation crop farm size is less than 2 acres," Agro-economist John Maloney said.

Maloney, who is currently on survey visit for his research on 'inadequate access to land in South Asia' informed Business Recorder that most of the rural population in Pakistan has inadequate access to land.

Referring to an earlier study on the subject, Maloney said the country inherited from the British an extremely concentrated distribution of owned area and a pattern of land tenure charactersied by sharecropping.

By 1954, two-thirds of those owning less than 5 acres controlled only 16 percent of the land in the Punjab; the less than 2 percent of landowners who owned more than 50 acres controlled 25 percent of the area, with 0.1 percent of landowners owning more than 500 acres controlling 10 percent of the area.

All of the high-growth Asian economies with substantial agrarian sectors such as China and Thailand, have a fairly even distribution of land ownership. Because farm size and productivity appeared to be inversely related, this egalitarian land distribution was likely to have contributed to their economic growth.

"To the extent that small and medium farms are more productive than large farms, the current size distribution of farms in Pakistan reduces agriculture output," Maloney said.

The extreme concentration of owned area generated a specific pattern of land in Pakistan. The large owned areas implied high supervision costs if self-operated using hired labour.

"By transferring some incentives to the tenant, (and to) sharecropping this large owned area allowed these large landowners to reduce high supervision costs," Maloney said.

According to one official survey by 1947 only 40 percent of the area in Punjab was self-cultivated, the remaining 60 percent was operated by share tenants. More than 50 percent of the area was operated by tenants-at-will.