Philippine oligarchy deprived the nation's farmers by sabotaging the agrarian reform

10 June 2015

THE STRUGGLE FOR LAND JUSTICE SHALL CONTINUE
AND SHALL PREVAIL !!!

A year has passed since the expiration of CARPER’s* power to issue notices of coverage. Landlords and capitalists in real estate development, agribusiness and mining are gleefully celebrating, gloating over what they see as the death of agrarian reform in our country.

Ayala, Henry Sy, Villar, Gokongwei, Andrew Tan, Lucio Tan, et al. are now engaged in aggressive, shameless corporate land grabbing. Certificates of Land Ownership Award (CLOAs) of thousands of farmers in thousands of hectares of land have been arrogantly dismissed, including the 1,760 hectare Hacienda Matias in Bondoc Peninsula. Another problem are DAR’s “ reported but still no land awards” accomplishments, including 21,000 farmers in the towns of Barugo, Alang-alang, Carigara and Jaro. Installation remains an unkept promise in Brgy. Bugho as well as for 1,800 more farmers in Ormoc City, Leyte.

Hacienda Luisita, which was finally distributed after a 45 year-long struggle, is in danger of falling once more into the hands of still another Cojuangco, if the beneficiaries cannot break free from the sangla or aryendo system and from sugar cane cultivation for the benefit of the sugar central of the Cojuangcos and their new landed and corporate partners.

The DAR and government as a whole have failed to deliver the comprehensive support services needed by the farmers of Hacienda Luisita and other areas. This failure has been one of the major pitfalls in the implementation of the law. It is still unclear what will happen to the distribution of 76,000 hectares of untitled and privately-claimed agricultural lands (UPAL), which now appears to have been completely shelved.

Hundreds of thousands of more farmers in 600,000 hectares have been kept in limbo, still awaiting the promised benefits of agrarian reform. To add, a million hectares of land have disappeared from DAR’s target in 20 years of CARP. Other farmers have been cheated due to land conversion, cancellation of EP/CLOAs, exemptions and uncontrolled retention of land by landlords.


CARPER, STRANGLED BY STATE-OLIGARCHY COLLUSION

The agrarian movement did not invent the numbers cited above. They are the result of a detailed review and analysis of fluctuating DAR statistics during the 26 plus years of CARP and CARPER. These numbers have been checked and verified by narratives from thousands of farmers and farm workers.

The data is clear evidence of the collusion between government and oligarchs in haciendas, agribusiness, retail, real estate development and mining. Such collusion was going on during the Cory Aquino administration and has continued unabated during the time of Ramos, Estrada, Macapagal-Arroyo and Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino.

We believe that, contrary to what others may claim, CARP and CARPER are not bogus land reform programs. CARP was what the legal democratic movement was able to claim, from the legal gains of two decades of anti-dictatorship and national-democratic struggles. CARP was the outcome of a struggle between those who supported agrarian reform and those who wanted to prevent it, a mix of positive content plus some obvious flaws and vulnerabilities.

We understood that CARP and CARPER were not, could not be the fulfillment of the dreams of farmers and agricultural workers and the nation’s young intelligentsia who fought with them in all arenas of struggles. But we chose to use CARP and later CARPER as a political space to be stretched to the limits to mobilize the peasantry who wanted to take advantage of this. In the process, we built an independent and assertive land rights movement. This is while according due respect to class brothers and sisters and their political forces who remained with the armed struggle for land emancipation. However, what should have been mutual respect and support (as we achieved to a certain degree in Hacienda Luisita) was besmirched by many cases when those arms were aimed, not against landlords and real enemies, but against other farmers also trying to uphold their rights.

CARPER, which tried to resolve some of CARP’s weaknesses, was the fruit of a decade of extensive and intense struggles launched by an open and legal agrarian movement and progressive movement--militant mass organizations and supportive NGOs and party lists in Quezon, Negros, Davao, Cotabato, Bukidnon, Tarlac, Iloilo, Laguna and other sterling struggles throughout the land. Such struggles were supported by Catholic bishops, progressives in Congress and in the Executive department, including DAR, as well as international organizations and networks. Without these forces, there would have been no CARPER. Above all we cannot forget the more than 30 peasant leaders who lost their lives in the line of fire, and hundreds more who were jailed, evicted from their homes and farms, denied their crops, and whose families were harassed, which only added to the already heavy burdens of rural women and children.

Government officials and functionaries and oligarchs greedy for wealth and power have tried to derail the agrarian movement via all acts of sabotage and obstruction that they can possibly muster. Every serious participant in and advocate of agrarian reform can testify to what this collusion has done to distort and conceal the real situation:

1) The circuitous process and heavy costs of implementing the law, the criminalization of farmers trying to secure their rights, highly irregular cancellations of EPs/CLOAs, illegal and violent land conversion, increase in retention for land owners, and irregularities in land titling.
2) The use of weaknesses in CARP such as the SDO and VLT to circumvent real distribution
3) The use of violence against farmers, ranging from killings to harassment and threats
4) Corruption from the national level down to local government units.


CARP and CARPER do not start and end with land distribution. These are supposed to develop agriculture, livestock production, and businesses of farmers, and ensure that agricultural workers enjoy their rights and benefits, including a living wage. Such steps will guarantee a better life, education and a bright future for their children, and the practice of democracy in the countryside.

Unfortunately, the program to uplift beneficiaries has been disorganized and discordant, instead of being a systematic program to support agrarian reform beneficiaries. In many cases, it has been perverted by large and small cases of corruption, bureaucratic processes and corrupt politics that are taken advantage of by powerful and moneyed landlords, agribusiness and real estate capitalists. It is not surprising that the program for agrarian reform communities, or ARCs, has become largely distorted and stunted, despite the infusion of millions of dollars from Official Development Assistance or ODA from governments of Europe, Japan, Canada and the U.S.

NEO-LIBERALISM: ANTI-AGRARIAN REFORM

Aside from serious failings in its implementation, CARP was seriously undercut by severe restrictions imposed by other laws. One is the 1990 DOJ Opinion 44, which removed from CARP coverage, land declared to be non-agricultural before the law’s approval in 1988 – a large maneuvering ground to exempt vast tracts of agricultural lands. And in 1991, the Local Government Code allowed LGUs to change the classification of land from agricultural to another. But perhaps the biggest blow to CARP and the prospect of agrarian reform was the government’s adoption of the economy’s neoliberal direction.

Article 12, Section 1 of the 1987 Constitution, which clearly enunciated the national development framework of “ industrialization and full employment based on the sound development of agriculture and agrarian reform” was violated and cast aside with impunity by the national government from the last years of the Cory Aquino administration up to the present Aquino administration.

Instead, what dictated the economy’s direction was the WB-IMF-ADB’s prescription--liberalization, privatization and deregulation. Far from a symbiotic relation between industrial growth and land distribution, which ensured the success of agrarian reform and developed the economies of capitalist countries such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and the socialist countries of Vietnam, Cuba and the first surge of building socialism in China toward a more egalitarian society, we turned our back on this historic lesson.

Now we experience its consequences : ever larger cartels and monopolies in agriculture that reap super profits from the control of production, unending poverty, and widespread joblessness and ruined small and medium busineses and livelihoods. The promise of a more equitable more equitable distribution of opportunities, income, and wealth by the same Article 12 Section 1 of the 1987 Constitution was made to vanish completely.



TO THE NEXT ROUND OF STRUGGLES,
BIGGER, MORE INTENSE, DEEPER AND MORE ADVANCED

Despite all obstacles and dangers, the agrarian movement has advanced agrarian reform. It has been able to maximize the positive provisions of CARP and CARPER to secure access to land, push for additional benefits, and form independent and , militant organizations of farmers and farm workers up to the national level

Indisputably the gains achieved in terms of genuine distribution of land, dismantling of haciendas and landholdings, and delivery of necessary support services have decisively come from the people’s struggles and sacrifices—of lives, blood, sweat and resources . These have not been given; they have been paid for, earned and won by determined farmers and agricultural workers.

These victories will be our stepping stone to reach the next phase in advancing agrarian reform. Landlords and capitalists in agribusiness, mining and real estate development are deluding themselves if they believe that they have buried the struggle for land rights and justice.

Agrarian reform will not end with CARPER. Land grabbing oligarchs wallowing in corporate wealth and political power will not end agrarian reform. Neither the stonewalling traditional landlords nor the greedy and aggressive agribusiness interests. We refuse to allow this to happen. We will not let this happen. At stake is NOT ONLY the right to land of millions of farmers and agricultural workers. At stake is the people’s right to food—affordable, secure, nourishing and intertwined with our history, culture and traditions.

The backbone of our agriculture is formed by the millions of producers in family farms who will grow even stronger in the future, when they are organized within cooperatives and/orin state and public farms. It is they who will bring us food security. Not real estate developers and mining companies that destroy crops and irrigation systems. Not agribusinesses that produce ‘commodities’ for sale and profit, and not food for the people. Not the importation of food that we can very well grow ourselves.

The revival of our industries, the national demand for decent jobs for all, are contingent on the success of agrarian reform. Agriculture will provide a substantial part of the capital, raw materials and cheap food for the millions of working people that will get decent jobs and raise livelihoods with a genuine industrialization policy and program. Rural areas will develop into a huge market for manufactured and industrial goods and services, and at the same time, provide food through farming and animal husbandry for the millions who will free themselves from poverty. Hence, home-grown agriculture, industry and services will become a platform for a global strategy of trade, investments and finance that will redound to the equitable growth of our economy.

Agrarian reform is an important weapon that will dismantle oligarchical dynasties and the backward enclaves of landlords cum warlords that continue to persist in many areas of our country. It will help to establish democracy in both rural areas and in the entire national landscape.

In the coming stage of our struggle, we will insist on the complete and total dismantling of land monopolies, which is the very essence of agrarian reform. We will clamor for the return of the lands denied us by the use of exemptions and conversions, as well as maneuvers, lies and violence. We will insist on recognition of cancelled and hidden EPs and CLOAs, and accountability for those who were responsible for this travesty of justice.

We will not swerve from our aim of dismantling trading monopolies in agriculture that destroy small farmers and businesses. We will insist that state financing for agriculture be channeled principally and decisively toward the development of family farms and cooperatives. We will fight for cheap and easy, if not free access to technology and scientific knowledge that will be used to improve production.

We will form a movement that will bind farmers, agricultural workers, workers in the cities, women, indigenous peoples, professionals, youth and students who all have a stake in the success of agrarian reform, in food sovereignty, full employment and the exercise of political power by the nation’s working people. We will undertake to patiently overcome divisions within the peasant movement so that we can all advance, in broad formations, strongly and deeply, and with greater wisdom and solidarity.

We will use all possible spaces and opportunities offered by laws, policies and precedents, and all provisions of international human rights covenants. We will hold on to all the rights that we have won in order to achieve still more. We will employ them not only to achieve concrete gains but to build ever-larger organizations and movements. In this way will we build our strength and be victorious—in struggles, in organizations, in our unity.

Our experience has shown us that we cannot fully achieve land justice and prosperity if we do not change our country’s social and political system. The agrarian movement should be a major component of the entire movement for genuine change--for democracy for all, for people’s sovereignty and for social equality.

Greed and exploitation will disappear for good. Justice, prosperity and equality will overcome and live on.

JUSTICE FOR FARMERS AND AGRICULTURAL WORKERS!
JUSTICE FOR THE ENTIRE FILIPINO PEOPLE!

___________

*
1. CARPER or Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms is the popular acronym of Republic Act 9700 which was approved on August 7, 2009 which extended for the second time for a period of five years the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law or Republic Act 6657 which was passed on June 10, 1998.

2. KATARUNGAN is a national social movement organization of farmers, fishers, agricultural workers and activist advocates established in 2008 and is working with various communities in Tarlac and Pampanga in Central Luzon, Quezon in Southern Tagalog, Iloilo and Aklan in Panay, Leyte and Samar, Negros Occidental and Oriental Negros, and Davao Oriental, North Cotabato, and Sultan Kudarat.
KATARUNGAN has a counterpart in the NCR region known as KATARUNGA