Any student of history will tell you that a recurring feature of 20th century revolutions and civil wars was conflict over land ownership, driven by the resentment of the rural poor against the concentration of agricultural wealth in the hands of the elite. (Cuba and Vietnam, where Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh picked up support by championing farm reform, are good places to start.)

So Pakistan’s plans to sell farmland to rich Gulf investors deserve serious attention, even if land ownership does not have the same ability to grab headlines as its nuclear weapons.

Waqar Ahmed Khan, the Federal Minister of Investment, said last month Pakistan was offering one million acres of farmland for lease or sale to countries seeking to develop food supplies, and was holding talks with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and other Arab states. He said all land up for sale or lease was currently unused and promised to hire a security force of 100,000 men, funded by foreign aid, to protect their investments.

His comments prompted a column in U.S. website The National Interest, which argued that the farmland sales would serve as a recruitment tool for Islamist militants who have already picked up support by championing the cause of Pakistan’s rural poor against the feudal elite which dominates the country.

The devil, as usual, will be in the details, but the following obvious questions spring to mind.

What does it mean for Pakistan’s fractured society?

In an article in the Huffington Post, Eric Margolis became the latest to argue that the battle against Islamist militants in Pakistan’s north-west is in danger of morphing into a much wider conflict – ”a national revolution in Pakistan against the western-backed feudal oligarchy that has ruled it since 1947.”  If correct, then any perception that the rich were benefitting from farmland sales at the expense of the poor would only stoke this anger further. 

 An editorial in the Daily Times says that “despite the blatant forms of exploitation that keep occurring due to skewed land holding patterns in our rural areas, it was disappointing that major political parties did not squarely take up the issue of land reforms in their manifestoes prior to the 2008 general elections. Conversely, instead of trying to take concrete steps to empower the rural poor, the current government is now trying to lease or sell large tracts of agricultural land to Arab states, in lieu of attracting foreign investment to Pakistan.”

“Government officials claim that the land being offered to the Arab nations is not under cultivation, therefore there is no threat of displacement of indigenous communities, or erosion of local food sovereignty. However, the environmental hazards posed due to deforestation, land degradation and increased water consumption also need to be taken into account before making such confident claims,” the editorial said.

Dawn newspaper reported that the provincial government in Balochistan was putting the brakes on plans to sell farmland to Arab investors. However, the unnamed experts it quoted appeared to be divided between arguing that farmland sales would bring much needed investment and modern management techniques to Pakistani agriculture and questioning the details of how the scheme would be implemented - rather than opposing the idea outright.

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Defence analysts in South Asia have been saying for so long that India and Pakistan might solve their problems over Kashmir only to end up at war over water that I had almost become inured to the issue. That was until I read the following comment on an earlier blog about Gulf investors buying up farmland in Pakistan to offset food shortages at home:

“Tough challenges await the investors in this sector due to serious water and energy shortages that the country suffers from at the moment,” it reads. “For effective investment in the agriculture sector, the government must clear these impediments first.”

The comment prompted me to hunt around for evidence of growing tension between India and Pakistan over water, needed to irrigate the land to cope with food shortages and for hydroelectric power — an increasingly attractive alternative in view of high fuel prices.

A quick trawl turned up this overview in the asia sentinel: “Water is destined to be a determining factor in the regional conflicts of South Asia in the years to come, particularly between India and Pakistan,” it says. ”While the West is busy concentrating its efforts on securing a ready supply of oil, in South Asia the governments are slowly but surely waking up to the fact that in the not too distant future water is going to be equally, if not more, important to the survival of their people.”

More specifically, Ijaz Hussain in the Daily Times analyses a row between India and Pakistan over Indian plans to build a hydroelectric project – the Kishanganga dam — on a river on its side of divided Kashmir. Pakistan fears the project will disrupt its own plans to build a hydroelectric dam on the same river on its side of Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have successfully regulated their use of the rivers they share in divided Kashmir through the Indus Waters Treaty  (see full pdf document here), signed in 1960 under the auspices of the World Bank. It is the only agreement to have been fully implemented by India and Pakistan; it held through two full-scale wars in 1965 and 1971 and survived a period of intense antagonism which began with the nuclear tests in 1998 and ended with a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing Kashmir in late 2003. 

How well will it hold up in the current global crisis over food shortages and high oil prices? Relations between India and Pakistan are better than they have been for years, yet the challenges they face in providing food and electricity for their people and their industries are greater than ever.

I shall return to this subject and would appreciate comments offering links or ideas about how far water is going to replace Kashmir as the main irritant between India and Pakistan.

In the meantime, here is an observation to be going on with. The Stimson Center, in a history of the Indus Waters Treaty, attributes the success of the World Bank in brokering the deal to its insistence that the “functional” aspects of sharing water resources for mutual benefit must be separated from the political aspects of the India-Pakistan relationship.

Yet when Indian Power Minister Jairam Ramesh spoke of the row over the Kishanganga dam earlier this month he said: ”This is an issue with geo-strategic and foreign policy implications. The prime minister would have to give it a thought.”

Did he misspeak? Or were his words about the geo-strategic implications of water a sign of things to come?