Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape
Abstract
This paper explores the Pakistani government’s 2009 agricultural investment policy package — a response
to increasing foreign investor interest in agricultural land — and considers the likely implications for local
communities. By analysing the policy pertaining to the categories of cultivated and uncultivated land, the
paper explores possible consequences that peasant farming communities and grazing communities face.
The policy’s dependence on arbitrary and anti-poor colonial-era laws and processes places the policy
squarely in established centre–periphery relations rooted by colonial-era politics of land ownership. Thus,
the offer of agricultural land to foreign investors is both an unprecedented international land grab and a
development in ongoing land appropriation by influential people through state apparatuses, continuous
with colonial practices. This in turn has spurred community responses within the same dynamic of
colonially rooted centre–periphery conflict; community responses revolve around various ethnic
separatist movements that originated in earlier colonial politics. Apart from the precarious balance of
social and economic power in Pakistan — evident in the making and implications of the agricultural
investment policy — the findings point to an urgent need for the Pakistani government to address
environmental and food security issues