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Some of the most beautiful traditional Chinese scroll
paintings are of carp in clear stream or lily-pond
water. To Philippine landlords and farmland owners, however, CARP is
a detestable fish, for it stands for Comprehensive Agrarian Reform
Program.
A related acronym is CARL, the
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law under which CARP came to life with
a fixed time for its demise, June 1998.
Land reform programs have
succeeded in only two countries and a province of China—Japan,
Korea and Taiwan. Unlike theirs, our agrarian reform laws have
always been moved by the fervent desire to serve the cause of social
justice. But our land reform efforts have miserably failed to bring
it about. Both landowners and leftwing activists, in fact, say that
CARL and CARP have caused injustice and bred corruption.
More realistic land reform
The land-reform success countries
were more realistic. They were less enthralled by rhetorical pieties
than our lawmakers and land reform advocates. They launched their
land reform programs not so much to redress the grievances of
landless farmers as to convert them into middle-class people with
disposable incomes to consume the products of massive
industrialization programs, to buy homes being built by massive
economy-boosting construction projects and to participate in the
stock markets and thereby contribute to massive capital-formation
programs.
When CARP’s life was about to
end in 1998, Congress passed a law to provide the funds so the
Department of Agrarian Reform can continue, for another 10 years,
acquiring land from landowners and distributing land to landless
farmers. The second death of CARP will happen on June 10—if
Congress does not pass the law extending its life.
The Catholic bishops of the
Philippines—together with pro-land-reform organizations all over
the country—have been urging Congress to pass the CARP extension
law. We support these calls for extension.
But we also call for drastic
changes in the CARL and in the implementation of the CARP.
The landlords and their most
radical enemies of the left are one in denouncing CARP and CARL.
CARPed landlords’ complaints
Landlords whose farm estates have
been CARPed righteously complain that their lands were not priced
properly. The law and the market values were not honestly applied in
the DAR’s pricing of their lands. This enabled the government to
acquire their lands and distribute these to farmer-beneficiaries
illegally and unjustly. They could not sue the government or
DAR—for in most cases the power of first-instance assessment of
the merits of the landlords’ complaints is, by law, held by DAR.
Even if the acquisition price set
is fair, DAR in the end could not go through with the deal because
it does not have enough money. The DAR budget is simply not enough.
‘Huwad na CARP’
The leftwing militants, for their
part, attack CARP for being a fake agrarian reform program (“huwad
na CARP”). They show how crazy it is for immediately putting a
poor peasant beneficiary in debt: for the capital gains tax he has
to pay for now being a landowner, to the Land Bank or some other
government bank without whose money the land could not have been
acquired by DAR from the landlord, and to suppliers of fertilizer,
seeds, irrigation water and whatever else is needed to make the land
produce its crop.
Both the Left and the Right
criticize DAR for incompetence and even corruption. They mock
government’s inability to provide ample support services to farmer
beneficiaries.
The biggest proof of CARP’s
failure is that more than 50 percent of CARP beneficiaries are no
longer tilling the land they were given by DAR. They illegally sold
their lands to third parties, violating the terms of their being
agrarian reform beneficiaries. Those who bought the farms from them
have harmfully converted them into malls, golf courses, residential
subdivisions and real estate development projects.
Some analysts have persuasively
shown the correlation between the progressive decline of farm
productivity in the Philippines and the increase of the DAR’s
acquisition and distribution of farmlands through the decades.
A basic flaw in the CARP
situation is that while Congress passed the law giving CARP its
means of funding after it expired in 1998, the law neither
specifically amends CARL’s provisions to actually state that the
life of CARP was being prolonged for another ten years nor repeal
CARL’s provisions putting a limit to DAR’s time for the
acquisition and distribution of land to 10 years (from the time CARL
took effect in 1988). Therefore, all the acts of land acquisition
and distribution DAR has made after June 1998 are illegal—if the
law as it now stands is to be respected.
Remove all infirmities
The new law extending CARP must
remove all the infirmities of CARL and make sure that its
implementation will no longer allow injustice. All the farmland
illegally sold by farmer beneficiaries must be recovered from those
who bought them. All the opportunities for graft in the
implementation of the agrarian reform program must be removed. Much
stiffer penalties must be imposed on those who break the law.
Definitely, the Supreme Court
decisions on land-reform cases through the years must be
incorporated in the new law.
The end of CARP’s life will be
on June 10. Lawmakers have promised to pass the new extension law
before Congress adjourns on June 13.
Let’s pray the new law will rid
the CARL of its defects and contain provisions that will reform the
way agrarian reform has been carried out.
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