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Consultations and workshops have been going on since last month among farmers and fisherfolk organizations for the drafting of a new land reform bill that seeks to replace the obsolete and pro-landlord Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law passed in 1988.
Rafael Mariano, chairperson of the activist peasant group Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, says the present land reform law aims to correct the historical injustice committed against Filipino farmers and break the land monopoly currently enjoyed by big landlords and corporate interests.
According to Mariano, seven out of 10 Filipino farmers are still landless and chained to various forms of exploitation and one-sided relations by their landlords or employers.
Mariano wants genuine agrarian reform to be at the center of national development. He says the current and previous land reform laws have been anti-farmer and have legalized landlessness, land grabbing and land appropriation by the powerful few.
The radical land reform Mariano is endorsing, the Genuine Land Reform Bill, seeks to break the dominance of foreign and local monopolies over Philippine agricultural lands mainly through the expropriation of land and other assets. It would redistribute the land to the tillers for free, with preference given to those who have been occupying their lands as tenants and leaseholders.
The proposed law would prohibit the sale, mortgage or transfer of expropriated land except to the peasant associations or political authority constituted under the initiative of parties concerned in cases where the owner-tillers could no longer till the land for one reason or another.
A policy of expropriation with compensation would apply only to landlords with a record of actively supporting progressive land reform, the peasant leader said. Despotic landlords would not be entitled to any kind of compensation.
Mariano said, under the proposed new land reform law, landlords proven to have engaged in land grabbing and other high crimes including killings, the maintenance of private armies and other acts of despotism and hostility to farmers in cases of agrarian disputes would be the targets of automatic expropriation without compensation.
The radical land reform law envisioned by farmer groups in the Philippines also assures that the welfare of all agricultural workers in terms of adequate wages, satisfactory working conditions, retirement and other benefits would be promoted and undertaken.
To increase productivity in the agricultural sector, the Genuine Land Reform Bill provides for technical and financial assistance in the form of subsidies to farmers for the purchase or rent of farm machinery and equipment, low interest or interest-free credit to enable them to expand production and raise productivity in order to assure urban areas of their stable supply of food and other agricultural products.
Social justice advocates in the Philippines will surely support the proposed legislation. For them the present Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program executed by the previous regimes and current administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is a comprehensive failure.
The CARP, started in 1988 under the administration of former President Corazon Aquino, was supposed to distribute 10.3 million hectares of land to farmers across the Philippine archipelago. The law mandates the Department of Agrarian Reform and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to undertake distribution of 3.8 million hectares and 6.5 million hectares of land respectively.
In 1995, the national government reduced the scope of the program to 7.5 million hectares, with the agrarian reform department tapped to distribute 4.3 million hectares and the environment department 3.5 million hectares. The CARP, which was extended from 1998 to 2008, had achieved a poor 57 percent performance rating by the end of 1997, according to Ibon Philippines, an independent think tank.
From 1987 to 1992, the Aquino administration distributed a total of 1,104,380 hectares, the Fidel Ramos administration from 1993-1998 distributed 1,778,371 hectares and the Joseph Estrada administration distributed 242,547 hectares from 1999-2000. The present Arroyo government distributed 548,916 hectares of agricultural lands from 2001 to 2005. The total aggregate number of hectares distributed over 18 years of CARP was 3,584,214 hectares from the scope of 10 million hectares of land eyed for distribution in 1988.
But Ibon Philippines and other farmers groups in the Philippines agreed that government land reform reports should be taken with a grain of salt because these reports were not credible indicators of the true state of landlessness in the Philippines.
On the other hand, the KMP peasant group said 65.9 percent of the total 12 million agricultural lands in the Philippines were exempted from the government's land reform program. Worse, the government is engaged in continuous confiscations of land reform awards, such as emancipation patents, certificate of land ownership awards and certificate of land transfers to pave the way for land remonopolization and land refeudalization and land use conversions for industrial and commercial purposes.
The KMP also said some 62.3 billion pesos (US$1.4 billion) of funds coming from taxpayers' money, including foreign donations and those from confiscated accounts representing ill-acquired wealth of the family of former President Ferdinand Marcos, were spent for the land reform program of the Macapagal-Arroyo administration -- an indication that it was merely a milk cow of those in power.
The proposal for a radical agrarian reform law is likely to face an uphill battle. Congress, which is composed of many landowning lawmakers, is expected to kill or oppose the bill. But as real makers and charters of history, the farmers will eventually win their cause for land, truth and justice.
The history of class struggle and class emancipation will favor the downtrodden and landless farmers, but for the meantime, let's expect a battle royale of class interests to erupt between farmers and landlord-lawmakers as KMP lodges its radical land reform bill to Congress for enactment.
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(Gerry Albert Corpuz is a correspondent of Bulatlat.com, an alternative Philippine online news site. He is also the head of the information department of Pamalakaya, a national federation of small fisherfolk organizations in the Philippines. His website is www.gerryalbertcorpuz.motime.com, and he can be contacted at themanager98@yahoo.com. ©copyright Gerry Albert Corpuz.)
