The ugly spectre of corporate farming may have disappeared from the headlines, but it has certainly not gone away. And with climate change increasingly impacting indigenous agriculture, it is of serious concern for a variety of reasons. First and foremost is the inescapable fact that corporate farming has the potential to escalate the unavailability of fresh food to the general population. While food is being produced on corporate farms, it is primarily intended for export only and as the number of such enterprises expands, the amount of land in use for the production of national food supplies is correspondingly reduced. Thus, the supply and demand being the ‘game’, prices in the country will escalate and push essential items even further out of reach for the common man than they already are.

It is not only national food security which is being impacted by corporate farming. Despite the government’s claims, small farmers, especially if they happen to be tenant farmers, are pushed off their holdings by the arrival of corporate farms which demand huge tracts of unbroken land for their large scale, highly mechanised, intensive farming methods which slowly but surely destroy the land and local ecosystems through heavy, often unwarranted, use of chemical interventions right from soil preparation through to the harvesting stage and even afterwards.

The government passed the Corporate Farming order in 2001 and the cabinet ratified it in 2004: This act allows for the lease of farmland to foreign companies on 99-year terms, divided into 50-year and 49-year agreements and the then government identified a massive 1.14 million hectares of land in Balochistan, Sindh and Punjab as initially being available for the purpose.

Since then the UAE has sighed MoU’s with the government of Balochistan for approximately 151, 200 hectares of land and a Dubai-based investment firm is also reported to have purchased agricultural land valued at $500 million. In addition to this, the Qatar Meat and Livestock Company has invested somewhere in the region of $1 billion into corporate farming in Pakistan and this is just the tip of a very nasty iceberg indeed.

The myth that these companies are only grabbing currently unused or previously useless land is just that: completely unused land is a rarity in this country as land which may appear, to the unthinking, unused is always used by someone even if this is merely on a seasonal basis and no corporate farming concern is going to take on the ‘useless’ land, as this would eat up too high a percentage of their investors’ money to bring it into production, let alone to reap the desired level of profit expected and demanded by all involved.

As climate change and extreme weather events become the norm rather than the exception here, periods of serious drought or devastating floods are expected to increase in the near future. These changes will obviously reduce existing agricultural production, speeding up the already evident trend of Pakistan becoming a food importing rather than a food exporting country.

In conjunction with this, the climatic change is leading to serious water concerns throughout the country, be it water for the household, industrial or agricultural use. Our farming industry is severely crippled by seasonal lack of essential irrigation water — a lack which is bound to be exacerbated by the establishment of huge corporate farming enterprises that have shockingly been promised unlimited access to the water that they require in massive amounts.

The arrival of corporate farming in Pakistan that sounds the death knell for indigenous agriculture, is liable to result in increased levels of hunger and poverty, will drive even more rural dwellers to seek the non-existent streets of gold in urban centres and will speed up environmental catastrophes which are already waiting to happen.