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….
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.
From Part One
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? (end of Part One)
A new class of poor landowners
Most significantly, neither can it be denied that Central Luzon and Southern Tagalog, which were the original regions that demanded authentic agrarian reforms, hardly make it to the top five regions of agrarian reform beneficiaries. Massive land conversion to purposes other than agricultural, left many of these areas with neither farm nor farmers.
In many areas, the dubious achievement of CARP was merely to become the worst real estate scam in Philippine history, barring none.
No, it cannot be denied that through its land parceling and distribution activities Philippine agrarian reform has spawned a new class of poor land owners with very little wherewithal and opportunity for increased and sustainable land productivity. Holding the CLOA or Certificate of Land Owners Award as land title the members of this class amortize the price of the land they had bought by operation of law for a term of over 25 years – indubitably an added burden to their already impoverished condition.
Losing the awarded land to private creditors who now become the new crypto landlords is a common fate. Gardeners know that farmers do not sell their land. They lose their land more often than not to creditor-traders.
Surviving by converting land use to non-farming purposes is another common condition.
Thus one sees so many food lands taken out of food and agricultural uses for other immediate money-making purposes at a cost to the nation in shrinkage of good agricultural lands badly needed by a growing population.
The sine qua non principle
Is there, then, any future at all for land reform-agrarian reforms in the Philippines? Gardeners say there is if the underlying principle of agrarian reform is understood, accepted and applied.
What is that principle? This: land does not belong to the landowners alone—old or new—but to all the people. It is a limited resource for a growing number of humans.
Land ownership, therefore, has to be inescapably regarded as stewardship—that is, merely a means to attain the purposes of land use, which are:
1) Food security for all;
2) Decent habitats for all; and
3) An ecologically harmonious economic regime for the common good.
The Gardeners’ Translation of the Principle to
TEN Immediate Basic Measures
Firstly, for the immediate, the state must put a stop to business as usual in the LAD (land acquisition and distribution) aspect of the total agrarian reform program that would evidence a national tendency to throw good money after bad. How many so-called ARBs (agrarian reform beneficiaries) are there who only exist on paper but do not actually till the land, or who have received CLOAs (certificates of land ownership) without really knowing what the piece of paper is all about? Scarcity of land resource demands that the government conserve the same for the whole citizenry and for generations to come.
Secondly, the state must help beneficiaries consolidate small farm holdings to correct the negative impacts of land parceling. Consolidation may take the form of progressive integration of beneficiaries with farmers’ collectives and cooperatives. These farmers’ collectives and cooperatives shall carry on the management of the consolidated farms within their territory and pool available resources to ensure greater returns to owner-cultivators and sustained productivity. In this way responsibility for sustained increase in productivity becomes communal. In such a situation, individual cultivators will enjoy psychological security, knowing that they are not alone in confronting the manifold problems related to farming (cf. R.A. 6657, Chapter IX, Section 39). Preserving the communal nature of land and other natural resources will strongly promote greater and sustainable productivity.
Food security is often equated with the production of sufficient quantities of food – in other words with agricultural productivity – one of the uses of land considered commonly owned by all. With population increase, intensive production becomes a must using proper agricultural inputs like soil-enhancing nutrients and fertilizers etc. and on scales large enough to be more efficient and more productive. To have large scale farms, however, one does not have to reject the small farmer or gardener approach. One only needs to consolidate the many small farms to achieve the desired economy of scale. In fact, UN-FAO data show that small farms almost always produce far more agricultural output per unit area than large farms, and do so more efficiently when consolidated.
Thirdly, the state must convert idle public lands suitable to agriculture into state farms, place these under the management and operation of farmers’ cooperatives and associations, and invite in willing landless farmers, by way of “stewardship contracts” under terms and conditions that will ensure maximum returns to them, sustained productivity, and government revenues through lease rentals or in the form of (a proposed) land value tax.
Fourthly, in advancing as much as feasible the stewardship system over agricultural lands, the state must conduct a thorough and conscientious audit of all CLOAs awarded. Such lands under CLOAs that are found to be in the possession of ARBs other than the original awardees shall be deemed to be of public domain, and will form part of lands for consolidation, cultivation and development within the stewardship system.
Fifthly, farmers’ and producers’ cooperatives and associations must be given priority as beneficiaries of the land consolidation program conditioned on non-parceling of these lands after distribution and their non-conversion to other uses by the beneficiaries.
Sixthly, the state must support individual beneficiaries in the effective use of land, of modern technology, and of environment-friendly farm practices to ensure just returns and productivity. It must speed up the consolidation of fragmented farms, with sufficient regard to the rights of owner-cultivators, and to ensure better access to infrastructures, technology, farm inputs and material, and financial assistance from public and private agencies.
Seventh, the state must support the establishment of an Agricultural Marketing Service such as the one envisioned in the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act (AFMA), taking into account the following reflections: that agricultural prosperity and food security are not merely about food production and productivity; that today they are more about post-production and the appropriate food marketing systems that relate to the basic and complex process of moving food and farm products from producer to consumer—quickly, efficiently, and with fairness to all.
Eighth, what is the need for rural industrialization? Admittedly, as the history of civilizations has shown, it is industry that provides goods, services and material comforts to improve living standards. And it is the complex of social values such as human dignity, self-reliance and gainful employment for every person that sets the quality of life.
True, rural people live on land and agricultural development is a must. But it is not enough. Agriculture should have a nexus with industry and transform the industrial mode of production to one that is friendly with Earth.
In theory, all Philippine land reform laws talk about this necessary nexus making rural development and industrialization the very purpose of agrarian reforms. In practice, however, there has been very little understanding and therefore very little effort systematically to bring that nexus about.
Rural industrialization should not necessarily mean setting up large industries in rural areas. It is, in fact, the opposite of the pattern of urban-oriented, capital-intensive industrialization that has produced severe imbalances in developing countries. Rather, it is the coupling of rich, renewable local resources with technological advances, utilizing every part of a plant, for example, from “leaf to root” and maximizing the returns for the resource, providing additional incomes, employment and equity and keeping people in the rural areas instead of bringing them to the city slums.
In this connection, the state must set up the requisite big post-harvest facilities of sufficient number and in appropriately distributed locations. These will be administered be farmers’ cooperatives or corporations, and used by farmers upon payment of reasonable toll.
Ninth, it is time to start seriously considering the land value tax. In the view of social philosopher Henry George (following Patristic social philosophy), since the economic value of raw land and its natural resources (the koina or the commons) results entirely from social action, i.e. the action not of a single individual but the action of the many in society, that value should be shared by all and not accrue to any single “owner”.
George said that this result could easily be accomplished by taxing away all or most of the “economic rent”— i.e. the rent that raw land or its resources would bring on the open market.
As it is not practical in modern society for most resources to be held in common since the practice usually leads to bureaucratic management which often benefits no one very much, the answer of Henry George, which is thoroughly practicable, is that society should collect rent for the Land (and for all other natural resources) from those who command exclusive use of this common heritage, in other words from those who “privately own” what really belongs to all.
He recommended decreasing if not abolishing the tax on buildings and other similar matters (fruit of human effort) and thus give property owners the incentive to build and to maintain and improve their properties.
Human-made wealth belongs to the producer; the state should not tax wealth produced by human labor. It should rather collect rent on land for the real owners of land, which are all the people. Human labor did not create land; so, it is “owned” by all. Therefore any one using it must pay “rent” to all, the real owner. For the state to collect that rent for all the people is precisely to levy the land value tax.
Finally, tenth, the state must declare all agrarian reform beneficiaries’ immediate and absolute freedom from amortization debts to the Land Bank of the Philippines. By historical logic and definition, the former tenants and leaseholders—the poor farmers as a class—have more than paid their dues to both landlord and State down the decades and down the centuries. They must be allowed now to rise to a new freedom—the freedom of the children of the soil who collectively own or cultivate the land and abide in life-giving harmony with it.
All this could be the future of Land Reform in the Philippines. Will it come about? What did the old song say? “The future’s not…”
FINIS
Charlie Avila -The Gardener
-The Gardener’s Tales-