Category: land reform

High stakes confirmation hearing

Carol Pagaduan-Araullo

On Wednesday, three progressive Cabinet members — Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Gina Lopez, Social Welfare Secretary Judy Taguiwalo, and Agrarian Reform Secretary Rafael Mariano — will be up for confirmation by the powerful Commission on Appointments (CA).

They have been twice bypassed by the CA and subsequently twice reappointed in the interim by President Rodrigo Duterte. But because the current CA has approved a rule that a Cabinet member may only be bypassed three times after which the CA will have to reject or confirm the concerned official, it appears that Wednesday will be the final showdown.

Read on…

mindanao, PDAF, CARP, china

mindanao http://manilatimes.net/doublespeak-and-the-mindanao-peace-agreement/72293/
PDAF http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/572215/return-pork-4-solons-told
CARP http://opinion.inquirer.net/70623/where-is-social-justice
china http://www.philstar.com/opinion/2014/01/31/1284980/losing-goodwill

This land is mine

By Amelia  H.C. Ylagan

Spanish colonial law prohibited Spaniards from taking land already occupied by the natives…(But as) native chiefs…were coopted into the colonial administration, they later started selling or donating great parcels of these lands to the friar orders in the name of their villages or towns. That was how the vast friar lands, and later the vast private landholdings came to be, in the 300 years of the Philippines under Spain.

In her 1998 paper, “Twenty Years of CARP,” Aurea Miclat-Teves traces the history of real property ownership in the country and landlord-tenant relationships that necessarily developed to till the huge tracts of land. The opening of the Philippines to world trade in the late 18th century increased demand for Philippine produce, and this “intensified the system of exploitation and abuses” on subjugated tenants and sub-tenants by the friar-landowners and landlords, including “the middle layer of non-cultivating leaseholders calledinquilinos, mostly Chinese mestizos and former native chieftains who had amassed wealth.” Social justice for the small farmers is an old issue for the Philippines.

The earliest efforts on agrarian land reform were when the Philippines was sold to the US for $20 million in 1898, after the Spanish-American War. The Americans encouraged settlements for the disadvantaged, while private property limited to 16 hectares was regulated under the Torrens Title framework. Still, the haciendas and plantations of the mestizerias (Spanish- and Chinese-descent landed rich) were allowed to survive, some historians say because the Americans expediently used ascendancy of this elite socio-economic group as the initial leadership clique for the so-called “government of the people, by the people”

World War II interrupted serious efforts at egalitarian land reform.

Independence was granted to the Philippines on July 4, 1946, and Filipinos had to grapple with setting up the republican government, where land reform was a later task to do. Meantime, social unrest festered in the hungry rural areas, where the economic rehabilitation after the War was slow. It was the indulgent ambience for the leftist protests and power-show of the 1950s and ‘60s. Came then the 1962 Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) with make-over changes for the Catholic Church — explicitly directing clergy, religious and the laity to work for the poor and support land reform, among other growing social and human rights concerns.

Then President Ferdinand Marcos’ 1972 Code of Agrarian Reform of the Philippines was the official starting point for land reform. Some point to the crony system in the dictatorship that favored big land owners and weakened the efforts for reform. After Corazon Aquino was installed as President by the 1986 EDSA I People Power Revolution, Republic Act No. 6657, otherwise known as the 1988 Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL), was signed into law and became the legal basis for the implementation of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

The 10-year life and budget of the Aquino CARP expired in 2008, and there were still 1.2 million hectares of agricultural land to be redistributed to landless farmers. The Philippine Congress was generally perceived to have reluctantly passed the five-year CARP Extension with Reforms Law (CARPER), inherited by Cory’s son, Benigno Simeon Aquino III, from the extraordinarily expanded nine-year regime of his political archrival Gloria Arroyo.

According to a 2009 activist blog “Bulatlat”: among other provisions, the CARPER bill mandates that private agricultural lands — the type that the Arroyos and the Cojuangcos own — can only be distributed if the original CARP managed to distribute 90% of its target. But CARP, despite the two decades it had, only distributed less than half of it. It’s an impossible provision that only underscores what progressive farmers have been saying all along — that CARPER is bogus.

Socially-conscious groups Anakpawis, Bayan Muna, Gabriela Women’s Party and Kabataan were cited as against the conversion of land to other uses (e.g., residential subdivisions, cyberparks, etc.) beyond the close to a million hectares that already slipped from CARP as of 2002. Also objectionable is the option to landowners for “alternatives to the physical distribution of lands, such as production or profit-sharing, labor administration, and distribution of shares of stocks which will allow beneficiaries to receive a just share of the fruits of the lands they work.”

Some more than 5,000 hectares owned by Eduardo Cojuangco in Pontevedra, La Carlota City, La Castellana and Himamaylan evaded physical distribution to farmers under CARP by creative stock option and joint-venture schemes, which fully involve the farmers in the liabilities without full and direct ownership of the land. Such, likewise, is the exception of nearly 6,500 hectares of Hacienda Luisita (owned by the Cojuangco family of Tarlac), where the farmers were given shares of the company under the stock-distribution option instead of physical land distribution.

Of course the only sympathy in agrarian land conflicts should be for the poor framers, forever the cult symbols of the oppressed and defenseless in society; the rich landowners can always take care of themselves every which way. That is the instinctive politically correct thinking. In 2001, the then newly-installed President Gloria Arroyo promised to distribute the 157-hectare Hacienda Bacan in Negros Occidental’s Guintubhan village in Isabela town, with the other pieces of agricultural land owned by the Arroyo family (in the name of her husband, Mike Arroyo) to farmers under the CARP program. But nothing happened to the promise, and in 2008 the protesting farmers who walked all the way from Negros (bridged by the RORO barges) were jailed for subversion, according to a report by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

In view of their similar reluctance to yield their landholdings to the small farmers under CARP, it can only be judged the utmost crudeness for the Arroyo sympathizers to rile up the farmers claiming Hacienda Luisita against PNoy Aquino — as was shamelessly done during the impeachment trial of ousted Chief Justice Renato Corona, midnight appointee of Arroyo, and opportunistically self-proclaimed “Defender of the Hacienda Luisita framers.”

And now the Hacienda Luisita farmers are up in arms against Aquino, and are stronger in their self-righteousness by the invaluable support of the CBCP (Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines). The farmers are certainly justified in their issues, but the politicians hoping for political mileage in the coming 2013 elections are low-down devious for the havoc they are selfishly wreaking. Alas, that the land reform issues in our flailing, struggling country have become so pathetically political – the purity of the fight for noble justice and equality has been so tarnished.

You have no choice, President Aquino. Settle the Hacienda Luisita problem in favor of the farmers soonest, and put away the deadly weapon of your evil detractors. ahcylagan@yahoo.com

 

hacienda luisita: 1,527 hectares still owned by cojuangcos

everyone was expecting pained remarks from the aquino-cojuangco camp after the supreme court ruled that compensation is to be based on 1989 valuations.  but, nothing.  i wondered if maybe because they had read alex magno’s “Hacienda” where he says The price for the blood-soaked land is probably ridiculously low. That might be what social justice requires. 

Recall that the agreement in the fifties, in exchange for government financing acquisition of the hacienda, was for the landowners to distribute the land to the farmers by 1968. Since that time, the matter was tied up in litigation.

It will probably take at least a year for the land to be actually redistributed. That means that all of 45 years was lost to the farmers fighting this case in the courts.

Any day added to the waiting and any peso added to the price of the land will be an injustice. A more militant position on this issue might have pegged land prices at their 1968 levels — the year the land was supposed to have been redistributed.

In addition, a portion of Luisita land was sold earlier by its owners to a private company. The farmers, who have been stockholders in the meantime, demand a share of the proceeds from that sale. Hacienda Luisita claims the money made from the sale have all been expended. But if the farmers deserve a share of that, the amount due them might be discounted from what they have to amortize from here on.

or maybe they read solita collas-monsod’s “Screwed coming and going” where she points out that in 1989 the cojuangcos used that same 40,000 per hectare valuation which gave the family absolute control of the new corporation, Hacienda Luisita Inc., and the farmers only one-third ownership.

which is really some kind of poetic justice, no?  but wait.  tila unfinished, incomplete, ang justice, after all.  read mareng winnie’s punchline.

Remember: The total land area of Hacienda Luisita that should have been subjected to agrarian reform was 6,443 hectares, but the actual area reformed was 4,916 hectares. Which means that the owners of Tadeco, with the approval of the DAR, were allowed to keep for themselves 1,527 hectares of land.

That’s a heck of a lot of land. Even if one deducts 66 hectares that supposedly comprise the sugar mill land, 263 hectares supposedly unfit for agriculture, 266 hectares of roads and creeks, and 121 hectares “given” to the farmers for home lots, there would still be 811 hectares of land left for the owners of Tadeco.

Eight hundred eleven hectares of land is larger than most of the other sugar plantations in the country.

Which leads to the question: Shouldn’t the DAR reform that land, too? The original decision of the Supreme Court gives it the authority to do so. I sincerely hope that Agrarian Reform Secretary Gil de los Reyes is made of stern stuff.

wow.  ang coconut and rice lands, someone correct me if i’m wrong, 7 hectares lang ang puwedeng i-retain ng landowner.  ano ba yan, iba pang kaso?  talaga naman.  pahirapan.  state of the nation.