MANY amongst the Pakistani intelligentsia claim that colonialism is dead. They say we should take responsibility for problems that we have created rather than laying blame at the altar of our past masters. What they fail to acknowledge, however, is that our present masters reproduce structures of power that scarcely differ from their colonial predecessors.

The much-hyped corporate farming initiative is the latest example in this regard. Initially introduced into the policy lexicon by the Musharraf dictatorship two decades ago, the scheme has been revived to great fanfare by the military-backed PDM 2.0 regime. As one of the main pillars of the SIFC, corporate farming envisions the construction of new perennial irrigation canals that will then facilitate the establishment of oligopolies in the agricultural sector.

The colonial lineages are clear for anyone who wishes to see them. The foundational imperative is to put millions of acres of ‘wa­­steland’ to productive use through mega wa­­ter infrastructure. This is the same imagin­a­­ry of development that undergirded the Bri­­tish Raj’s social engineering over a century ago.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Pu­­njab and northern Sindh were sparsely populated regions where agriculture was limited to riverine belts. Most indigenous co­­­­m­­­munities were pastoralists with distinct social mores from the prototypical peasan­try. The British considered these populations backward and declared their grazing lands as ‘waste’, thereby setting the stage for infrastructural and social transformation.

Corporate farming will add to ranks of the propertyless mass.

The colonial state initiated a wave of canal and barrage-building, creating what Imran Ali famously called a new ‘hydraulic society’, by drawing on the productive power of the Indus water system. Millions of people from east Punjab were migrated west to populate the so-called canal colonies. Indigenous peoples were relegated to the bottom rung of the social ladder, prohibited from owning new agricultural lands under the colonial property regime.

The Pakistani state carried on where the British Raj left off. The Tarbela and Mangla dams were constructed within the first two decades of 1947, laying the foundations for further social engineering. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank happily fun­ded all postcolonial development projects, as they continue to do today. But the fallouts of colonial developmentalism were never acknowledged. Caste divisions were deeply entrenched, with agriculturalists privileg­ed over so-called ‘non-agricultural’ castes. Caste overlapped with class to give rise to a propertyless mass that was permanently depres­sed due to a patronage-based political order.

Caste and class divisions were at least challenged periodically by left-progressiv­es. Ecological fallouts were not even recogni­s­­ed for decades. Today we know that excessive damming and canal-building upstream has devastated the Indus delta and agricultural regions in lower Sindh. Mega water in­­frastructure also gives rise to a host of other environmental crises, including wat­erlogging and excess salinity. On the economic front, dams and canals cost a literal fortune, contributing significantly to our foreign debt burden. And they need to be rehabilitated every few decades, providing further funding opportunities for the WB and ADB while reinforcing the power of the irrigation bureaucracy.

Corporate farming (read: the new great land grab) is the latest phase of the (post) colonial developmental regime. On the one hand it will condemn small farmers who cannot compete with big agribusiness firms. It will thus add to ranks of the propertyless mass in rural Pakistan, a number that is already beyond 30 million.

On the other ha­­nd, new water infrastructure — like the Cholistan Canal — will displace historical pastoralists and completely tra­nsform ecosystems in several regions. It will also seal the fate of already devastated ecologies in coastal Sindh. The Diamer-Bhasha dam has already set this new ecological disaster in motion.

As was the case under the Raj, asking critical questions about corporate farming in particular and mega water infrastructure in general means being declared anti-development. We are supposed to offer only salu­tes of approval to all fantastical establishment-backed schemes. It is taken for gr­­­­a­­­n­ted that handing over millions of acres of land to opaque ‘private-public partnerships’ is all in the so-called national interest.

In case anyone has forgotten, Pakistan enjoyed a bumper wheat crop a few months ago but small and medium-sized farmers could not market their surplus because the hybrid regime approved the import of millions of tonnes of wheat. We are now being told that corporate farming will allow the country to not only meet its own needs but also flood export markets.

Colonial masters pillage people and ecosystems at will, turn light into day, and then tell us to close our eyes and applaud. Some things never change.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, January 3rd, 2025