Pakistan

If Islamabad chooses to sell valuable agricultural lands, may be India could help itself in partnership with the Gulf businessmen who want to produce fruit and vegetables in Pakistan. After all, the Gulf knows a lot less than India about agribusiness and we might well want to import food in the not too distant future.

During Pervez Musharraf’s time, Beijing had proposed that it be leased 2,000 acres of land for a period of 10 to 15 years with the agreement that China would make technological and financial investments in the land, invest in newer forms of seeds and other products and leave the new infrastructure to the state or the owners after the termination of the contract.

Civil society, including African farmers unions, need to educate local people that such land deals are not in their interests, however couched in 'win-win' terminology they appear to be.

Last May, while Pakistan’s military was waging its offensive in Swat, Islamabad officials were simultaneously launching another offensive in the Gulf: a charm offensive to secure investment in Pakistani farmland.

It is unfortunate that even as deals that involve land which should belong to the people of Pakistan are struck, there has been so little public debate about the plan. We need to be informed of what is planned. Protests need too to be mobilized. In the prevailing political environment of Pakistan, the people who stand to lose the most have almost no spokesmen.

The government should enhance rural funding and at the same time curtail federal non-development expenditures in order to avoid leasing country’s land to foreign investors.

The Lahore High Court Bar Association (LHCBA), in a unanimously adopted resolution on Tuesday, demanded the government immediately withdraw leasing of agricultural land to other countries.

The Lahore High Court Bar Association stated that farmlands were being acquired by the Arabs as front men for the Americans who would eventually use them for possible military bases, because Arabs had been front men in the bid to purchase Pakistan Steel Mills (PSM) for an Indian businessman.

Pakistan is pushing ahead with a plan to sell or lease agriculture land to foreign investors even as opposition grows at home.

Lahore High Court Chief Justice Khawaja Muhammad Sharif on Monday sought a report and comments from the federal government by September 29 on a petition challenging the proposed sale or lease of millions of acres of agricultural land to other countries.

American drone attacks against the Taliban are routinely condemned in Pakistan as violations of national sovereignty. But there is little criticism of how our own government is threatening the country's territorial integrity by engineering the lease of millions of acres to foreign investors.

There are better means to meet the food needs of the Saudis than to lease thm land that belongs to the state and the people of Pakistan