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By Rene Q. Bas, Editor in Chief
Who has more clout with senators and
congressmen—the Catholic bishops or the landlords? We will know by
June 13, when Congress adjourns. If by that Friday, Congress has
passed the law extending the life of CARP—a strange fish abhorrent
to most landlords for being the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform
Program—then the bishops and the landless farmers have won.
Otherwise, critics of Congress—mainly
left-of-center ones—can crow that they have again been proved
right that most of our lawmakers are landlords and their allies.
The Catholic bishops who held the
Bishops-Legislators Caucus 3 a fortnight ago came away with
commitments from the legislators that they would pass the law giving
at least five more years of new life to CARP after it expires on
June 10.
The House leaders who gave their word to the
bishops reiterated their vow to The Times.
Our House reporter, Sammy Martin, flashed me the
message: Congressmen are committed to extend the life of CARP by
passing the law on third and final reading before Congress adjourns
sine die on June 13.
The reality is that at this writing and as noted
by pro-landlord author Ernesto M. Hinojas of Panay News, the
consolidated substitute bill is still being debated on the floor of
the House.
In the Senate, committee hearings on the CARP
extension bills filed were held last week.
The intentions of the Comprehensive Agrarian
Reform Law or CARL, which instituted CARP in 1988, cannot be
faulted. It would redress the landless farmers’ oppressive poverty
and their not being the owners of the land they till for a living.
The devil, as always, is in the details of
implementation. Some allegations of corruption and inefficiency have
been made about the way the Department of Agrarian Reform has been
carrying out its tasks.
The CARL originally gave the Agrarian Reform
Department under the CARP a timetable of 10 years to acquire and
distribute land to the landless farmers. It had not done even half
of its assignment at the end of the first 10 years. Congress gave
CARP another 10 years of life in 1998.
It’s now 2008 and the second 10 years of
reprieve will be over on June 10. DAR still has not completed its
work.
What’s worse—as the landlords keep telling
us—is that of the millions of farmer-beneficiaries to whom the
government has given titled land, up to 60 percent are no longer in
their farms. They have sold their CARP-acquired farmlands. How many
of them have become squatters and dirt-poor immigrants in Metro
Manila?
Why has CARP failed? One reason is that the CARP
program immediately makes a farmer-beneficiary a debtor. The
farmer-beneficiary suddenly finds that he owes the government a
capital gains tax for the property he now owns. And he is not
getting his land for free—he owes someone, the government or the
LandBank or another, the payment for the land he has received. Add
to this the weight of financing his own production expenses. His
landlord used to do that for him. Now he has to buy his own seed,
fertilizer and everything else to make his land productive. No
wonder, the children of farmers no longer want to be stuck to the
land like their parents.
But there’s also a bright side. DAR can give
anyone who listens a list of successful communities of
farmer-beneficiaries. In those provinces, farm productivity has
grown, signs economic and social development are impressive.
Some consumer-product marketing agencies (I
learned this from our Business Editor Arnold Tenorio) do their tests
in land-reformed Western Visayan areas. Product purchasing during
the pilot-market period is constant. That means the farmers have
disposable income for these new products.
We stand on the side of the bishops and the
pro-social justice NGOs.
May God grant their prayers for the passage of
the CARP extension law.
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