RAWALPINDI, April 18: The People’s Rights Movement (PRM), a confederation of social movements across Pakistan, has urged the government to abandon ‘capital-intensive’ agriculture initiatives such as corporate farming.

The PRM also pledged to work towards securing rights of landless tenants at the International Day of Farmers on Friday, a press release said.

It said Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali’s statement that land reforms would not take place simply reflected the interests that his government represented.

On their international day, farmers are coming together across the world to celebrate their history and culture, and to solidify bonds that had developed through the struggle for rights, the press release said.

Today, farmers reasserted their rejection of the Agreement on Agriculture in the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime, and urged the industrialized countries to stop destroying global agricultural markets by handing out subsidies to agri-business firms.   The farmers demanded that any global negotiation on the future of agriculture must begin with a fundamental reorientation of the paradigm of development which had been propagated by the international financial institutions and the G-8.

The PRM condemned the treatment of landless tenants, struggling for ownership rights on state farms in the Punjab, and private lands in the NWFP. The deputation of Rangers on Okara military farms proved once again that the state was committed to using force to deprive tenants of their rights. Similarly, tenants in Hashtanagar, Charsadda District, continue to remain primary targets of local landlords and the administrations seeking to evict them.

The PRM called for giving ownership rights to the landless tenants. It also opposed the use of genetically modified organisms and artificial inputs that had damaged agricultural lands in Pakistan and across the world. It called for repealing trade-related intellectual property rights regime of the WTO, which, it said, was usurping farmers’ rights.

The PRM also pledged solidarity with subsistence farmers across the world.