In Pakistan, small-scale farmers have been cultivating land for generations. Today, International Monetary Fund (IMF)-driven policies are dismantling the support structures that sustained them: the government has stopped announcing wheat support prices, authorized multinational companies to control crop purchasing, and allocated vast tracts of land to corporate farming. Peasants who have farmed the same land for a century are being told to leave.
Women bear specific weight in this crisis. In rural areas, besides dealing with the control and exploitation of their land and labor, patriarchal structures control whether they can occupy public and political spaces, have access to formal education, and choose a profession. Organizing against this system is made harder by surveillance and arbitrary detention.
Saima Zia comes from a small-scale farming family based in Pakistan. She is a member of the Pakistan Kisan Rabita Committee, an alliance of 36 farmers’ organizations across the country. The organization, formed in 2003, became a member of La Via Campesina in 2018, and has been building collective responses to the conditions of peasants in the country.
In this interview with Capire, Saima talks about what it takes for peasant women to organize in Pakistan, how neoliberal agrarian policies are reshaping rural life, and how movements are resisting state repression and the advance of corporate farming.