In a meeting last week with Catholic Church representatives and a few farmer leaders President Aquino declared – promised – proclaimed that he would complete land reform in the country by the Year 2014, as required by law.
According to his Spokesman, NOCs or Notices of Coverage for landholdings 25 hectares and above will be issued on or before December 2012; for 10 hectares and above on or before December 2012; and for those under 10 hectares-not later than July 2013.
Is this announcement making landowners of those land sizes nervous or excited – nervous over the prospect of losing their lands or excited over the prospect of windfalls from DAR and Land Bank for “just compensation”? How many tenants can now hope to make the transition to becoming small owner-tillers and would that prospective new status be a real guarantee for poverty conquest – and how: via greater productivity or through the immediate “loss”(illegal but real) of newly acquired lands to owner-creditors? Who will be the new landlords?
About 93.58% (900,188 hectares) of the lands yet to be distributed are private agricultural land, while nearly 85% (816,491 hectares) of the balance requires the government to pay the landowner just compensation. So, is all this presidential talk on land re-distribution for real this time around or merely another propaganda reply to pressures from church-farmer demands?
Come to the Garden. Let’s make a quick review of the land question.
Background
Throughout history, including a few hundred years of Philippine history, popular discontent with how land is owned has been one of the most common factors in provoking revolutions and other social upheavals.
The Philippines, a young country, is relatively old in land struggles. Hundreds of recorded revolts against the foreign land grabber which were always bloody and nearly always speedily crushed did not make the Filipino peasants tired enough to just quit – but tired enough to just rest and fight again another day – almost three hundred times over a four-hundred year period – or about one revolt a year!
To all gardeners, those who labor on the land – in other words, to actual producers, the non-producing landowner’s privilege of appropriating a substantial portion of production —in some cases one-half or even more—without making a commensurate contribution other than bare paper ownership of land has always been considered rank injustice and the root cause of mass poverty and underdevelopment.
We – all peoples from all cultures, whether gardeners or not – effectively tend to recognize land—including all natural resources— really if not legally as a distinct factor of production, distinct from and yet together with Labor and Capital, making the factors of production not effectively two but rather three in all.
We easily accept this – that Labor and Capital represent human effort and therefore deserve fair recompense.
Land, however, is another matter. Why? It is produced by no person’s effort or responsibility. It is one of the things that are “just there,” and whoever uses it may prevent others from doing so. And every one without exception needs it. We are all land-dependent entities, “land animals” all.
Society, therefore, must come to an agreement on the rules of the use of land. Hence, in the Philippine case, the many provisions of the nation’s Constitution practically redefining land ownership not as an absolute right, as Roman law always had it, but one in the nature of stewardship with the end of productivity clearly inherent in the means of ownership.
Agrarian Reform and Rural Development in the Philippine Constitution
The Philippine Constitution is replete with rather explicit land reform mandates:
“The State shall promote comprehensive rural development and agrarian reform” (Article II, Section 21, underscoring supplied).
“The goals of the national economy are a more equitable distribution of opportunities, income, and wealth; a sustained increase in the amount of goods and services produced by the nation for the benefit of the people; and an expanding productivity as the key to raising the quality of life for all, especially the underprivileged” (Article XII, Section 1, underscoring supplied).
“The State shall promote industrialization and full employment based on sound agricultural development and agrarian reform, through industries that make full and efficient use of human and natural resources, and which are competitive in both domestic and foreign markets” (Article XII, Section 1, underscoring supplied).
The State shall “undertake an agrarian reform program founded on the right of farmers and regular farm workers who are landless, to own directly or collectively the lands they till or, in the case of other farm workers, to receive a just share of the fruits thereof” (Article XIII, Section 4, underscoring supplied).
What the words mean
When we say “agrarian reform”, we refer broadly to an overall redirection of the agrarian system of the country. The redirection often includes or should include credit measures, skills acquisition, land consolidations, and other factors of pre-production, production proper and post-production measures undertaken by beneficiary communities.
“Land reform,” to be precise, is concerned with rights in land, urban or rural, and their character, strength and distribution.
For land reform to be feasible and effective in improving beneficiaries’ livelihoods it must fit into a broader policy aimed at reducing poverty and establishing a favorable environment for the development of productive agriculture by beneficiaries.
In the Philippines, this broader policy is rural development and rural industrialization – a constitutional mandate reiterated in the first sections of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law or CARL. Hence, for land reform the broader policy is often merely referred to and as often misunderstood as ‘agrarian reform’.
Unfulfilled Promises Regarding Agrarian Reform
We have often heard the managers of agrarian reform report a two percent reduction in poverty after many years of spending billions upon billions of pesos in the land acquisition and land parceling-out aspects of agrarian reform. Should we be impressed with such a claim? Of course not!
But we were assured many years back that the “welfare of the landless farmers and farm workers will receive the highest consideration to promote social justice and to move the nation toward sound rural development and industrialization” (R.A. 6657, Chapter I, Section 2).
Wasn’t the idea just great? Had it been implemented – had we really moved toward sound rural development and industrialization, meaning had the conditions for economic development and the creation of new wealth been already put in place, even in the subsequent years, including giving tillers access to capital, technology and markets, many of our people could already have started to become richer or less poor.
We must admit it, though, that we never moved in this direction; we never experienced carrying out with our own resources all of the steps of production—from the collection or extraction of raw materials or information, to the intermediate processing thereof, to the making of high value-added finished goods or specialized services.
And yet, our Constitution was quite explicit in mandating the State to “provide support to agriculture through appropriate technology and research, and adequate financial, production, marketing, and other support services” (Article XIII, Section 5).
The State could have provided “farmers and farm workers with the opportunity to enhance their dignity and improve the quality of their lives through greater productivity of agricultural lands” (R.A. 6657, Chapter I, Section 2). But, needless to say, this did not happen. The state was fixated on the aspects of land acquisition and distribution and the conversion of land from agricultural to non-agricultural purposes! At that point any suspicions of systematic state corruption are quite justifiable indeed.
The State promised to be guided “by the principles that land has a social function and land ownership has a social responsibility” (ibid.). Think on it for a while. It marked the first time in Philippine history that the non-absolute character of land ownership was affirmed in law. “Owners of agricultural land have the obligation … to make the land productive” (ibid.). Ownership was now being cast in the nature of stewardship. In that regard, through the Constitution, no less, the State committed to assist producers, as already stated, “through appropriate technology and research, and adequate financial, production, marketing and other support services” (Article III, Section 5).
But again, obviously, the commitment was not adequately realized—in great part because of the imbalanced identification of the whole agrarian reform program with one part thereof—land acquisition and distribution—which would routinely eat up more than three fourths of the total program budget to the near-total neglect of its connection to the very goals of the program, namely people’s liberation from poverty with the promised rural development and industrialization.
It is now clear that, indeed, a country may implement a “land reform” program in the crude sense of land acquisition and distribution, but if, however, the program fails to provide agricultural support services in the three moments of the process of pre-production, production proper and post-production, the newly “emancipated” peasant would still not be able to cope and he or she will end up much worse off. He may have been better off with a caring paternalistic feudal lord.
Isn’t this why rural poverty has worsened in the Philippines – precisely during the agrarian reform decades?
Timely and low-interest credit, mechanization, drying and warehousing – and, before all that, irrigation – where does the “newly emancipated” farmer turn to now that his former landlord is gone? To the government, of course, and, ah, there’s the rub. The results speak louder than words.
“Support service” in the Philippines, which is mandated by law, has been a tricky term. For a long time, support service meant government pushing massive dozes of chemical fertilizer to make the maximum three-hectare distributed lands economically viable for individual small farmers. This only resulted in new dependencies both for the farmer and the soil. Eighty-six percent of production cash costs went to fertilizers that an increasingly acidic soil needed more and more – like addiction. Thus so many farmers concluded that working so hard and spending so much was not worth it at all; hence, our massive importations and food insecurity.
Can it be denied that poverty in the Philippines is most acute and widespread in rural areas – where the agrarian reform program is supposed to be happening? (To be continued.)