Agriculture: The unfinished dream of land reforms

Agriculture has always been the backbone of Pakistan’s economy. In 1947, most of the land was concentrated in the hands of large landlords, while peasants were denied equal rights. The first major attempt at reform came in the 1960s under General Ayub Khan, who introduced a land reform programme aimed at redistributing land from big landlords to small farmers. However, these reforms largely failed as landlords exploited political influence to divide land within families, preventing actual cultivators from receiving ownership. In 1972, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto introduced another round of land reforms, but political pressures and administrative weaknesses once again rendered them ineffective. Subsequent governments experimented with subsidies, price controls on wheat and cotton, and investments in irrigation, but a coherent and sustained policy framework for small farmers never materialised.