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The Sumilao Land Reform Mess is how that recent dramatic event
should be called. Thousands of farmers from Bukidnon marched
and crossed the seas until they reached Metro Manila. They met the
President twice and persuaded her to take their side against a
corporation, San Miguel, that has invested millions in the land the
farmers claim to be theirs.
The S. L. R. Mess illustrates how unmanageable
the agrarian reform situation has become. There are some 30 to
40 cases similar to Sumilao.
The dozen or so laws supposedly aimed to achieve
“agrarian justice” are colossal failures as result of mendacity.
All these laws are based on one lie after another.
The Department of Agrarian Reform’s version of
the history of land reform in this country opens with a lie.
Under the title, “Pre-Spanish Period,” and a rubric,
“This land is ours God gave this land to us,” the DAR history
says: “Before the Spaniards came to the Philippines, Filipinos
lived in villages or barangays ruled by chiefs or datus. The datus
comprised the nobility. Then came the maharlikas (freemen), followed
by the aliping mamamahay (serfs) and aliping saguiguilid (slaves).
“However, despite the existence of different
classes in the social structure, practically everyone had access to
the fruits of the soil. Money was unknown, and rice served as the
medium of exchange.”
False. Our pre-hispanic ancestors were not
Filipinos. They had no concept of nation. They belonged
to separate tribes and kingdoms. Access to the fruits of the
soil differed from tribe to tribe. The people closest to the chiefs
had more access than those farthest from them.
DAR says, “The legal basis for the
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) is Republic Act 6657,
the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL), signed by President
Corazon Aquino on June 10, 1998. It is an act instituting a CARP to
promote social justice and industrialization, providing the
mechanism for its implementation, and other purposes.”
The CARP spawned by the CARL, just like earlier
laws and programs, including Marcos’ “New Society” land-reform
decrees, were departures from the original social-justice objective
of the first agrarian-reform attempts under President Manuel L.
Quezon.
The main aim of Quezon’s land reform efforts
was to quell the growing peasant unrest in Central Luzon.
“Social justice” (ideologues may define it any which way) was
the need of the time. Thus the 1935 Constitution states:
“The promotion of social justice to ensure the well-being and
economic security of all people should be the concern of the
State.” Laws pushed by Quezon were passed to regulate
landlord-tenant relationship and to limit reasons for the dismissal
of tenants with the approval of the Tenancy Division of the
Department of Justice. A law interfered with market realities
by fixing the price of rice and corn to help poor tenants and
consumers. Then the Rural Program Administration was created
in 1939, governing the purchase and lease of haciendas and their
sale and lease to the tenants.
Hundreds of billions have been spent and the
land reform bureaucracy has expanded a thousand-fold since Quezon
but agrarian reform has not been achieved. Land reform has
neither increased Philippine agricultural productivity nor reduced
rural poverty. Landowners are not investing in their farms or
rural-based industries.
Critics from all sides have openly declared land
reform, especially CARP, a failure. Some blame DAR’s focus
on land redistribution without seeing to it that adequate support
services are ready to back up the new farmer-beneficiaries.
Corruption and mismanagement have also beset CARP implementation, 60
percent of whose budget pays for the salaries of the more than
15,000 DAR employees and for departmental housekeeping.
Government allocation for DAR has always been much less than what it
requires, so that it lives on loans from the Land Bank and the World
Bank.
The Philippine left’s Kilusang Magbubukid ng
Pilipinas is fed up with CARP. The Kilusan says extending its life
when it expires next year “is not the solution to the landlessness
and grinding poverty of peasants.” Rightwingers as well as
neutral observers also think CARP should be allowed to die.
Let market forces rule
Land reform, as other countries have
experienced, is a complicated process. The countries always
cited for having successfully implemented land reform to become
tiger economies – Japan (under MacArthur’s control), Korea and
Taiwan – had dictatorial governments. Landlords were compelled to
obey.
Philippine problems of corruption, pervasive
feudalism in a legally democratic setting and bad governance will
not allow agrarian reform efforts to succeed under present laws and
socioeconomic conditions. In contrast, great improvements in
the income, quality of life and self-esteem of peasants have
happened in places where entrepreneurs, some of them returned OFWs
and retired citified folk, have invested in farms and partnered with
small farmers.
All real estate—including land covered by
agrarian reform laws – should be made subject to market forces.
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