THE
DESIGNATION by incoming President Rodrigo Duterte of Rafael “Ka Paeng”
Mariano as his secretary of agrarian reform is welcome news for the
Filipino peasantry, farmworkers and the rural poor. Mariano, born into a
poor peasant family in Nueva Ecija, is chair of Kilusang Magbubukid ng
Pilipinas and former Anakpawis party-list representative.
He will be the first Cabinet member to come from the peasant class,
who has a long history of activism on behalf of the marginalized rural
masses. Mariano immediately called for a review of the “antifarmer
decisions” of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) and announced his
priority in completing the long delayed redistribution of thousands of
hectares of the Cojuangco-Aquino’s Hacienda Luisita, the Araneta estates
in Bulacan and the Aguinaldo landholdings in Cavite.
Political will crucial
In implementing a contentious social justice program such as agrarian
reform, the political will of the sitting President is crucial. The
deficit here, however, has been appalling. Outgoing President Aquino’s
public stance and the absence of an agrarian reform agenda in his major
policy announcements reveal no sympathy, interest and understanding of
agrarian reform’s role in the country’s overall socioeconomic, political
and cultural development.
Ultimately, this self-indulgent and antireform mindset, common to all
Philippine Presidents, have spelled the doom of agrarian reform.
The question is whether Duterte, by his self-ascribed Left persona
and avowed socialist sympathies, would reverse the long-standing
presidential pattern of ignoring agrarian reform’s social justice
principles and stand firmly on the side of the long-suffering Filipino
rural masses.
28th year of Carp
This June, the Philippine government’s agrarian reform law reached
its 28th year of implementation with completion nowhere in sight. The
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) and its extension, the
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms (Carper)
had provisions that were generally favorable to their intended
beneficiaries. But Carp and Carper were also essentially the result of a
compromise between pro and antiagrarian reform blocs in Congress and
thus also contained provisions, inserted by antireform and landowner
lobbyists, that are considered legal loopholes.
CARP, enacted in 1988, was an improvement over previous legislation
in that it covered all agricultural lands and the entire rural landless
labor force. But it was hobbled by antipeasant and prolandlord
provisions that allowed mere regulation of existing tenurial forms,
including the nefarious stock distribution option and leaseback
agreements, provided for an omnibus list of exemptions, established
“fair market value” for landowner compensation, created a payment
amortization scheme that was unfavorable for beneficiaries, set a high
retention limit that could reach 14 hectares, mandated a long period of
implementation, and generally ignored the role of beneficiaries and
civil society groups in seeing the program through.
Carper’s record
Carper, on the other hand, also contained provisions that favored
beneficiaries, such as the indefeasibility of awarded beneficiary lands,
recognition of usufruct rights of beneficiaries, a grace period for
amortization payments, speeding up the process of awarding lands,
removal of the stock-distribution option, disallowing the conversion of
irrigable and irrigated lands, automatic coverage of lands targeted for
conversion pending for at least five years, reinstating compulsory
acquisition and voluntary offers-of-sale as main redistribution modes,
and recognition of women farmers as beneficiaries.
‘Killer amendment’
Despite all these gains, antireform legislators still managed to
insert a “killer amendment” that allowed landowners to determine who
would be beneficiaries and who would be excluded from the program. Other
objectionable provisions are those expanding the list of exempted
lands, allowing local governments to acquire agricultural lands beyond
the 5-ha retention limit and the deprioritization of seasonal and other
nonregular farmworkers as qualified beneficiaries.
Major CARP constraints, such as landlord compensation based on market
value and the beneficiary payment formula based on gross production,
have been retained.
According to the peasant organization Katarungan, the DAR has
accomplished only 18 percent of its 2015 target for land distribution,
“the lowest performance in the history of CARP implementation.”
In five years under the Aquino administration, less than 20 percent
of the goal for land distribution has been accomplished. As of December
2015, there remained a balance of about 477,000 ha of undistributed
lands while 1 million ha of agricultural lands inexplicably vanished
from the public records. To camouflage its lackluster performance, the
DAR has resorted to merely reporting the issuances of notices of
coverage as accomplishments while keeping from public view the more
essential indicators of certificates of land ownership awards (CLOAs)
and, even more crucial, emancipation patents (EPs).
Snail-paced implementation
Indeed, land distribution under the Aquino administration has been moving at a snail’s pace
—marked by a consistent and chronic failure to meet annual targets, the
misrepresentation of performance indicators and lack of political
commitment by the DAR leadership under Secretary Virgilio de los Reyes.
In the distribution of privately owned and/or privately controlled
landholdings, which constitute the heart and soul of agrarian reform,
the implementation of Carp and Carper has been found to be most wanting
and negligent.
Despite favorable judicial decisions, the redistribution of Hacienda
Luisita lands has been slow and bureaucratic with harassments of
worker-beneficiaries continuing. Worse, between 80 and 90 percent of the
hacienda’s distributed lands have been taken over by nonfarming
ariendadors (capitalist-financiers) due to the failure of government to
provide the required support services.
Landowner resistance
Chronic landowner resistance continues to plague the program with
numerous reports of farmers being evicted, harassed, intimidated and
killed by landlords and hired goons. Land grabbing and land-use
conversions are intensifying even in landholdings that have been covered
for distribution.
These converted and grabbed lands are often misappropriated for
nonagricultural purposes, such as real estate development, tourism,
mining and special economic zones by foreign and domestic land
speculators.
Property developers
Leading these antireform initiatives are influential politicians,
local governments and giant property developers. In many instances,
powerful families have taken control over public lands and have resisted
(sometimes violently) their distribution to qualified beneficiaries.
Rent-seeking property developers pose a counterproductive and
destructive role by their expansion into the Philippine countryside,
which encourages the conversion by local government units of
agricultural lands for commercial purposes. This is exemplified by the
land conflict in Porac, Pampanga, where Ayala Land is developing a
P75-billion 1,125-ha mixed-use commercial, recreational and high-end
residential estate.
The “Alviera” project was facilitated by the exemption from agrarian
reform coverage and conversion of 750 ha of Hacienda Dolores to
commercial use. The conflict has resulted in “the unsolved killings of
two Hacienda Dolores farmers, the jailing of a village chief, the
eviction of 300 farmers and the destruction of their crops and huts, and
the denial of access to a road traversing through Alviera property that
leads to Aeta villages and farms.”
Protest marches
In April, several hundred farmers marched for 122 kilometers from
Sariaya, Quezon to Manila. Organized by Katarungan and its NGO support
group, RightsNet, the farmers were demanding the full implementation of a
meaningful agrarian reform program, protection for the agricultural
sector, food sovereignty and return to farmers of the coco levy fund.
The Sariaya farmers lament the cancellation of CLOAs and EPs of 3,781
farmer-families covering 4,800 ha.
This was just one of the many long protest marches undertaken over
the years by restive Filipino peasants and farmworkers frustrated and
indignant over the poor track record of government in agrarian reform.
Special economic zones
Equally destructive of agriculture and family farms are the
proliferation in almost all regions of the country of special economic
zones, such as the controversial Aurora Pacific Zone and Freeport
Authority, displacing farms and peasant households and establishing
enclaves that have little or no backward and forward linkages with rural
communities.
Mining activities, on the other hand, impact negatively on farming
communities (including indigenous peoples) and on the agricultural
environment. As lawyer Christian Monsod pointed out: “Mining activities
are usually located in rural and mountainous areas and can affect
farmlands, rivers and shorelines, where the poorest of the poor are
located.”
Worse, land grabs by large mining companies are taking place, such as
the 508-ha farmlands in Calatagan, Batangas, tilled by 323 farmers and
covered by 818 EPs.
The Aquino administration, like all previous administrations, via its
inaction on abuses and its neoliberal economic policies of
indiscriminately welcoming any and all forms of investment regardless of
the social consequences, is party to and similarly accountable for this
uncontrolled pattern of dispossession and human rights violations
triggered by land speculations gone berserk.
Inadequate support services
The neglect by government agencies led by the DAR and the Department
of Agriculture to provide timely and adequate support services to
agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) have prevented the latter from
becoming economically viable producers and jeopardizing whatever land
distribution may have accomplished. Only 44 percent of agrarian reform
beneficiaries have had access to support services packages with 27
percent of them in so-called agrarian reform communities (ARCs).
As with other farmers, a majority of ARBs source their credit from
loan sharks,who charge usurious interest rates. ARBs in commercial farms
and plantations are forced to rely on former landowners and
corporations for support services. In Mindanao, reformed areas and ARB
ownership of lands have been rendered meaningless due to onerous
contracts, leaseback and lopsided growership and production
arrangements, leading eventually to farmer bankruptcies.
Property rights
The reasons for Carp and Carper’s failures cannot be traced, as a
University of the Philippines Economics professor argues, to the absence
of a fully functioning property rights regime “due to strictures on the
sale (and rental) of reformed lands and the land ownership ceiling.”
Under conditions of a protocapitalist system where political and other
noneconomic factors play dominant roles, where rural elites are
predatory in character and where rent-seeking financial speculation
through aggressive property developers rules the day, it would be the
height of naiveté to dream of a fully functioning property-rights
regime.
Even today, the absence of such a regime has not prevented
“investors” from invoking the “laws” of the market by encroaching on
land reform areas and harassing and dislocating legitimate ARBs and
other farming communities. All in the name of productivity, efficiency
and optimum land utilization.
Ayala Land, through its president for international sales, Thomas
Mirasol, candidly admitted that the lack of a “land use blueprint by a
regulatory body … has enabled it to acquire large plots of land and
develop them according to its own plan and design” (Business Times. May
6, 2014). Mirasol added that the absence of a land regulatory framework
“has been great for Ayala Land,” which uses its resources to develop
“big tracts of land” and thus “become the government; (that) control and
manage everything (and become de facto) mayors and the governors of the
communities that (Ayala) develops.”
On the other hand, an “efficiently managed” property rights regime
will simply open wide the floodgates of the rural areas to modern
versions of the unlamented landlord class and reintroduce the oppressive
and exploitative social relations that necessitated a land reform
program in the first place. It is precisely this elite-biased property
rights regime in the rural sector that a truly just and meaningful
agrarian reform seeks to prevent and where it exists, to overturn.
Recommendations
After 28 years of implementation of a program meant to emancipate the
Filipino peasantry from serf-like servitude to elite landowning
interests, the agrarian reform goal remains elusive with final
resolution nowhere on the horizon. To start the process of fixing this
dismal state, the incoming administration must immediately take the
following steps:
First, extend the land distribution component of agrarian reform
since it is obvious that the DAR will be unable to complete this by June
30.
Second, provide that all unpaid amortizations of farmers be condoned
and all future land distribution be made free of cost to the
beneficiaries.
Third, constitute a high level independent commission of upright and
credible citizens with legal powers to evaluate and audit the
performance of the DAR, Department of Environment and Natural Resources,
and LandBank, and investigate all circumventions of coverage and human
rights violations against farmers and farmworkers, their leaders and
supporters.
Lastly, the goal of equitable land redistribution must be made a
permanent feature of the state’s policy agenda. Land redistribution is a
continuing process that will necessarily have to be resorted to time
and again in order to assure that there is no backtracking on the
agrarian reform agenda.
Social justice has no beginning and no end.
(Eduardo Climaco Tadem, Ph.D., was one of the founders of the
Congress for a People’s Agrarian Reform in 1988 and coconvenor of the
People’s Agrarian Reform Congress in 2014. He is currently president of
Freedom from Debt Coalition and professorial lecturer in Asian Studies,
University of the Philippines Diliman.)
