PESHAWAR: Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek national coordinator Tariq Mehmood on Saturday said that the government was implementing neo-liberal policies instead of protecting the interests of farmers, especially small and landless ones, resulting in mass destruction of the working class.

PKMT national coordinator Tariq Mehmood told reporters here on the International Day of Landless Peasants that his organisation was committed to fighting for the rights of small and landless peasants and the working class.

“We’ll continue the struggle for food sovereignty while calling for just and equitable distribution of land,” he said.

Mr Mehmood rejected corporate control in food and agriculture and advocated for the “right to save and plant indigenous seeds.”

International Day of Landless Peasants marked in Peshawar

Accompanied by PKMT leaders Fayyaz Ahmed and Asif Khan, he said the organisation stood in solidarity with the working class and would expose feudal, capitalist and corporate land grabbing while promoting systems that empower local communities to control and manage land, forests, mountains, seas and other natural resources.

“We mark this day in collaboration with other peasant and anti-imperialist movements, like Roots for Equity, Asian Peasant Coalition, People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty, Pesticide Action Network Asia-Pacific and International League of Peoples’ Struggle, to highlight the struggles of small and landless peasants for food sovereignty and genuine agrarian reforms worldwide,” he said.

Mr Mehmood also highlighted efforts to expose oppression and coercion of and exploitation by multinational corporations and imperialist countries representing them, as well as the governments of Third World countries.

He said the world, especially Pakistan, was in the grip of a severe economic and environmental crisis, with millions of people, especially workers, suffering from extreme poverty, unemployment and hunger.

The PKMT leader said imperialist countries, especially the United States, were pushing the situation further downwards.

He added that those countries were engaged in environmental destruction, and looting and occupying land, water, oceans, forests, minerals and other natural resources through war and militarisation.

Mr Mehmood said that Pakistanis, particularly rural communities, were victims of those conditions.

He said in Mansehra and other districts, people were being denied access to forests, while in Peshawar, land was being taken from communities under the guise of development projects.

“In the name of Green Initiatives, thousands of acres of land in Punjab and Sindh have been allocated for corporate agriculture. The path has already been paved for multinational corporations to take over the dairy and livestock sector, which includes banning open and fresh milk and promoting companies’ packaged milk,” he said.

The PKMT leader said another grim development for the people suffering from hunger and landlessness was the federal government’s decision to abolish the minimum support price of wheat for 2024-2025 as the International Monetary Fund’s loan condition. This policy will be devastating for small and landless farmers, according to him.

Mr Mehmood said even the previous year’s support prices set by the government were insufficient to cover their cost of production, but handing over the price determination to the free market would ruin such growers.

He also complained that genetically modified seeds were being promoted by seed giant companies for huge profits.

“Huge corporations have been given thousands of acres of land to produce potatoes, displacing small and landless farmers who are now forced to work as low-wage labourers,” he said, adding that the potato seed on the land is owned by the corporations.

Published in Dawn, March 30th, 2025