A ropani of terraced land above the road in my mother's village sold last year for a figure that would take about thirty years of that land's agricultural output to recover, at good prices, in a good year, which the last four have not been. The buyer is a man in Malaysia. He has not seen it since 2018. Nothing is planted on it.
The village has more uncultivated land than at any point anybody can remember, and land there has never been more expensive.
Those two facts get reported separately, in different kinds of article, and they are the same fact.
What happened is that land stopped being priced as a thing that produces and started being priced as a thing that holds. If you are a Nepali man earning in ringgit or riyal, with eight or twelve years of it ahead of you, you have a problem that is not obvious from outside: where does the money go. The bank pays what it pays. The share market is a rumour. A business requires you to be present, which is the one thing you are not. Gold is possible and my mother's generation did exactly that, and gold cannot be seen from the road.
Land can be seen from the road. Land does not depreciate, cannot be stolen, is administered by relatives, and — this is the part that matters most and gets said least — it settles the question of whether you have done well, in a form the entire village can read without being told.
So the price of a terraced field near a road in the middle hills is now set by a savings decision made in another country, and it has almost nothing to do with what the field grows.
The consequence lands on exactly the person you would expect. A young household that wanted to farm — and there are still some, fewer every year, but they exist and I know two — cannot buy at a price set by remittance savings, and cannot rent, because the owner in Malaysia has no reason to let anybody establish a claim on land he is holding for thirty years. So the land sits, and the people who would have worked it go where the money that priced it came from, which raises the price further.
I want to put the counterargument in its strongest form, because there is a version of this essay that treats the buyer as the problem and he is the least culpable person in it.
He is doing the correct thing with his money. He has no pension, no employer contributing to anything, no confidence in any institution that would hold it for him, and a real and reasonable intention to come back at fifty-five. Telling him to put it somewhere more productive is telling him to accept a risk he cannot monitor from a labour camp, on the advice of people who have never had to. If I had spent eleven years on scaffolding I would buy the field too, and I would buy the one you can see from the road.
And the alternative institutions do not exist. That is not his failure. A country that wanted remittance savings to go into production would have to build something that a man in Doha could put money into and check on from a phone, and trust, and it has had twenty-five years and about a quarter of its GDP to do it with.
So the field stays empty and appreciates. My mother can name every parcel above the road and who owns it and which country he is in, which takes about four minutes and is the most accurate economic survey of that village in existence, and none of it is written down anywhere.
