SOMETIMES to go forward, you need to look back. At this difficult time in Pakistan’s history, the country must move forward by taking care of the stresses the economy is currently facing. Serious adjustments will have to be made and these will be possible only after people realise that some sacrifices are required.

Some time ago, game theorists such as Professor Nash, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics for his efforts, postulated that the solutions to the conflicts involving many people and many groups are possible only when all the participants recognise that in arriving at an accommodation they will have to accept an outcome that does not guarantee them all they wanted but something less than what they desired. This kind of a solution is more likely to survive and thus prove more durable than those in which the contestants attempt to attain all they wish.

There are several disputes and contests that have gone unresolved in Pakistan even 60 years after the country’s birth. In fact, some of the more important ones grew because of the way that the Pakistan Movement was organised by those who campaigned for the creation of Pakistan. They were also the product of the dynamics unleashed by the way the British partitioned India. I will briefly trace some of the political and economic difficulties Pakistan faces today to what happened 60 to 70 years ago.

It will be recalled that the demand for a separate state for the Muslims of British India was first articulated by the leadership groups from the Muslim minority provinces — the then provinces of Bihar, UP, New Delhi, Bombay and Gujarat. Firsthand experience of Hindu discrimination coupled with Hindu resentment against the Muslims because of the latter’s long rule over India created the perception that the Muslims would not be well treated in a Hindu-dominated independent India. Once this community failed to secure protection for themselves in the political structure that was contemplated for an independent India, they raised the demand for a Muslim state — Pakistan.

The Muslims who lived in the Muslim majority provinces of India — provinces such as Punjab, the Northwest Frontier Province, and, to a lesser extent, Sindh — were comfortable with their situation under the British. They did not think that they needed to worry when the transfer of power meant the creation of a Hindu governing majority. The leadership groups in these provinces, therefore, were not particularly enthusiastic about the idea of Pakistan.

When Partition resulted in a mass movement of people it brought about significant economic, political and social changes. These changes also led to disputes and tensions — unresolved to this day — among several groups of people. In a short period in the latter half of 1947, eight million Muslims came to Pakistan and six million Hindus and Sikhs went in the opposite direction. There were two streams among the migrants who came to Pakistan, each with its own socio-economic characteristics. Because of these differences, they sought settlement in different parts of the new country.

The migrants from the Muslim minority provinces were mostly urban, with better education and with a more liberal view of the political structure in the new land to which they were moving. They went to Karachi since that city had been chosen to be the country’s capital. There was expectation of jobs in government, industry, finance and commerce. And, to some extent, these expectations were initially realised. Accordingly, when Pakistan came into being, representatives of the migrant community gained access to power in the central government while the landed leadership of Punjab, the NWFP and Sindh were largely sidelined.

The second large stream of migrants came from the eastern part of Punjab which, after Partition, became a state of India. These people were mostly rural with the skills needed to run an economy based on agriculture. They sought accommodation in the western Punjab countryside, on the land vacated by the Sikhs. (The Hindus did not own agricultural land in western Punjab.)

The first major conflict that gained prominence in Pakistan’s history was between the migrant community in Karachi who had come to dominate politics and also, to some extent, the economic landscape and the political leadership of Punjab, Sindh and the NWFP. The migrants’ hold over political power could be ensured as long as the central government remained all-powerful and as long as the country’s capital remained in Karachi.

Ayub Khan, by moving the capital from Karachi to Rawalpindi, a city in northern Punjab, and by readmitting the landed aristocracy into the political arena, weakened both conditions that would have ensured the migrant community to remain in the saddle. From active participants in the political process, the migrants were to become marginal players. Their resentment at this change resulted in the rise of the MQM as a political force in Karachi and in some other large urban centres of Sindh. The migrants were comfortable with centralisation for as long as they had a large role to play in the central government. Now they want autonomy.

The other source of persistent tension arose because of the gradual dilution of the autonomy that the constituent provinces of Pakistan had enjoyed while they were part of British India. The military that has governed the country for more than half its life believes in central command and control systems. Under it, Pakistan became more of a centralised state than was envisaged in the Constitution of 1973.

One way of dealing with the tensions that continue to exist in Pakistani society is to allow much greater autonomy to the provinces. The new prime minister has already declared that his administration will do away with the Concurrent List, transferring all subjects included in it to the care of the provinces. He has promised to do this over a period of one year. For autonomy to lead to effective governance by the provinces, two additional changes will need to be made in the way the country should manage its economy and plan for economic growth.

The provinces should be allowed to formulate their own development plans based on their own priorities which, in turn, should take cognisance of their separate endowments. In developing these plans, the provinces must have greater say in the formulation of trade and industrial policies which hitherto was done by the central authority. Decentralisation and grant of considerably greater autonomy to the provinces should help to resolve some of the disputes that continue to generate political instability in the country.

IT wasn’t as if hunger didn’t already exist in Pakistan. It’s been slowly but surely growing for four decades; more rapidly for the last two.

It has been largely invisible in the countryside where independent television outreach is restricted. Shortages are impossible not to notice when cheap staples are exhausted before lengthening queues are served or food riots erupt. But even when those queues and images vanish from the TV screen, hunger will not necessarily have ended.

While the problem did not arise overnight, the fact remains that this did not come in the aftermath of an inherently bad and inequitable system designed to exclude the peasant majority from the ownership of the factors of production. Solutions have always existed, but they have always been suppressed by vested interests. Now, major international institutions, including the UN, independent scientists and even segments of the western techno-conditioned media have begun to concede that ‘modern’ oil-and-chemical based farming methods, which also contribute heavily to global warming, have to be abandoned for traditional ones. If the soil and water are to be saved for continued farming and climate change to be mitigated, farming methods will have to be changed. There must be some reason why multinational food corporations are increasingly trying to adopt an organic, ‘greener’ image.

Unfortunately, most urbanite bureaucrats and politicians divorced from how normal farming works have been consistently conditioned by unrelenting corporate disinformation and even outright falsehoods. They have been led to believe by hostage governments and captive academic and research institutions that artificial methods of ‘modern’ farming are the only way to feed a growing world. Instead, in less than half a century this approach has led to extreme global land concentration, and turned previously food-sufficient agricultural countries into food-dependent ones. The control and trade of 80 per cent of the global food supply has been taken over by four transnational corporations.

Consider the case of 1,000 acres of farmland owned by a single landlord, who buys expensive tractors and other machinery, poorly reproduced hybrid company seed, expensive chemical fertilisers and pesticides and fossil fuel, employs a few full-time overseers and cheap seasonal labour. Compare this with 1,000 acres divided up into two-and-a-half-acre plots among 400 families, averaging six to seven members each. Or even 100 acres under a single owner, similarly divided among 40 families.

Historically, two to two-and-a-half acres has been the manageable acreage for a family practising natural farming in the Third World. This assumes that water, a community or public resource, is made available to all, along with farm-to-market roads, storage facilities and credit from government banks as a citizen’s right.

What would such an arrangement bring about? Firstly, it would mean year-round food security since the smallholder would grow a large mix of seasonal crops and a variety of local fruit trees, and optionally breed chickens or a cow (which would provide both free milk and manure for fertiliser) if there is a community pasture nearby.

Together, they would not only provide abundant food but also a sizeable surplus — more than enough for buyers (arthis) to find it worthwhile to collect saleable items, farm by farm. After all, it worked in the past. In fact, state-financed transport services are warranted for this purpose just as bus services are in the cities. Incidentally, the Asian Tigers got where they did by providing such facilities to their empowered peasants. Even when peasants didn’t earn much in a bad year, at least they didn’t go hungry.

It means that the huge income appropriated by the landlord who never sweats for it and who probably never bought the land either, can be spread adequately over several thousand people who could instead double the output, variety and income. In other words, 1,000 acres can and should be serving 2,500-3,000 people directly — the farming families — and tens or hundreds of thousands of consumers indirectly along with the necessary middlemen. Instead, it’s all going to a single parasitical element who contributes nothing.

Multiply this potential hundreds or thousands or millions of times over, globally. This, too, would be without the misguided and destructive cost of oil-based monoculture that is poisoning whatever fertile land we have left. Gone would be the unnecessary, wasteful and crippling oil bill from agriculture at least.

It may be mentioned that since the Second World War, the cap on farm-holdings in Japan was set at about two acres, whether a private owner or a company. Today, the average Japanese farm family is educated, and enjoys modern comforts that urbanites do. So the oft-heard claim from deskbound ‘experts’ that small holdings cannot be productive is a lot of self-serving nonsense.

If Japanese smallholders could achieve such high standards of living, why couldn’t the Pakistani? Because Pakistani peasants were denied all their rights including land and water access, credit and other state services extended to the middle-class and elite. Japanese farmers have indeed been using undesirable industrial methods, but with increased awareness about the poisoning of the soil and water and the risks to health, they are slowly returning to organic methods that ultimately promise greater productivity.

Currently, the world produces enough grain to feed everyone. It’s not food that’s lacking but the buying power. The rise of global food prices by 50-300 per cent over the past year is also attributed to biofuel. The recent dangerous diversion of farmland to grow biofuel crops instead of food is both uneconomical as well as unsustainable, as it would necessitate starving half the world and poisoning the environment. Not only will less food be produced, the fuel yielded would vanish into the energy-intensive lifestyles of the well-off constituting a sixth or less of the global population, despite biofuels being the most destructive of energy alternatives.

It is necessary for the government, private industry and commerce to recognise that a peasant, like the industrial worker, is both producer and consumer. A wage is supposed to support an average family. If it doesn’t, the breadwinner is obviously not receiving a living wage but is grossly underpaid. Peasants are worse off because they are deprived of community resources — land and water — that have been allowed to be consolidated and privatised.

Apart from full employment and food security, peasants are the key to higher production. The diseconomies of scale apply even more on industrial farming. Large-scale farming survived globally only because of heavy and undue subsidies ripping off taxpayers. Sooner or later, they’ll have to go because economies can no longer afford supporting parasitism, mildly termed as rent-seeking. And sooner than later, it won’t be worthwhile remaining a big farm landlord.