Seventy percent of Pakistan’s population and 74% of Pakistan’s poor live in rural areas; among the rural poor, the incidence of poverty is greatest among agricultural laborers and tenants (Islam 1996). Poverty in Pakistan is strongly correlated with landlessness. According to the World Bank (2009), 2% of households control more than 45% of all land, severely constraining agricultural competitiveness and livelihood opportunities. Anwar et al. (2002) found that poverty is highest (54%) among the landless, noting that only 0.08% of Pakistani households own more than 2 ha of land, and that unequal land distribution is the primary manifestation of poverty in rural Pakistan.

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