The topic has not received that much attention in the past couple of years, but when the Philippines’ quarter-century experiment with land reform finally ends this coming June, it will have achieved an outwardly remarkable feat, as University of the Philippines Professor of Economics Raul V. Fabella explained in a paper published last month. By the expiration date of Republic Act 9700—the CARP Extension with Reform, or CARPER, which extended the original Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (RA 6657) of 1988—5.05 million hectares of the 5.37 million hectares targeted by the program will have been distributed, ostensibly accounting for 2.6 million new agricultural landowners with an average of 1.2 hectares each. The figures represent an astonishing 16 percent of the Philippines’ total land area of 30 million hectares, a program that dwarfs in size and duration the much-heralded land reform programs in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.