Agriculture accounts for around a fifth of the national output in Pakistan, and the crop farming sector within agriculture is responsible for less than a tenth of the gross domestic product. Yet over two-fifths of the workforce is employed in agriculture, and landlessness remains a key but not the predominant correlate of rural poverty. Access to formal sector employment now has as strong an impact on rural incomes as access to land, but the social and political power associated with land ownership can be critical in gaining access to rationed public resources including government jobs. Nevertheless, agricultural land ownership is highly unequal both in terms of the prevalence of landlessness, and in the concentration of land in relatively large sized ownership holdings. Around half of all rural households do not own any land, and the top 5 per cent own over a third of all cultivated area. Inequality in land ownership has been blamed alternately for poverty, social and technological backwardness, and political disempowerment.4 It is widely held that redistributive land reforms – that is, state’s takeover of land from large landowners and its allotment to the landless or land-poor  were slow to take off in Pakistan and did not achieve a great deal due to the political power wielded by the landowning classes5. The first significant attempt at redistributive land reforms was undertaken by the military regime of Ayoub Khan in 1959. This was followed by land reforms in 1972 and 1977 respectively by the populist government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). The 1977 legislation was still-born, as General Zia-ul Haq’s military coup against Bhutto in the same year suspended its operation. Subsequently, litigants argued that redistributive land reforms were contrary to Islamic precepts and Pakistani courts ruled that this was, indeed, the case. Currently much of the land reform legislation remains in abeyance.