Agrarian reform: Long on promises, short on performance

I-TEAM REPORT: THINK ISSUES

(Seventh of a series)

CONCEPCION, TARLAC—It was a scene from Marlboro country come alive.

The brothers Rocky and Joel Lopa, in full cowboy gear, came galloping on horseback at Hacienda Luisita as a security helicopter hovered overhead.

Guards of the “Yellow Army” with handheld radios prowled the plantation owned by the family of the late President Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino.

Days before, security men went around and told workers that they should put their heads down and focus on what they were doing when the Lopa brothers overseeing the hacienda passed by, recalls Renato Lalic, 44.

“We were not allowed to look at them,” Lalic says of the event in 1992, the only time he saw the owners come to this corner of the hacienda at Barangay Mabilog in Concepcion town. “It was very strict at the time.”

The Lopas belong to the family of the late Jose “Pepe” Cojuangco, Aquino’s father.

Don Pepe acquired the plantation from Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas in 1957 on a dollar loan guaranteed by the government “with the view of distributing the hacienda to small farmers.”

It hasn’t happened, although agrarian reform—the distribution of all agricultural lands—was a campaign promise of Aquino when she ran against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the snap election shortly before his ouster in the EDSA People Power Revolution of 1986.

Centerpiece program

Land reform has been a centerpiece program in Asia and Latin America to extricate the poor from poverty and promote social justice.

Philippine leaders have vowed to pursue the program since the revolution against Spanish rule broke out in 1896, when Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo sought the confiscation of friar lands.

But powerful interest groups have intervened to keep it from happening, sparking a communist revolt in Central Luzon in the 1950s and sending guerrillas rapping at the gates of Malacañang.

Suntanned with close-cropped hair and a Joseph Estrada moustache, Renato Lalic has liberated himself—temporarily at least—from the hacienda managers.

He joined an estimated 5,000 hacienda workers who took over the plantation following a violent strike in November 2004 that claimed two to seven lives—depending on who’s talking—and paralyzed operations to this day.

Lalic occupied two hectares, borrowed money and planted rice and corn, making a net income of around P110,000 per harvest, a far cry from the P15,000 he earned annually as a hacienda worker.

“Yes, life’s a little better,” he says, proudly pointing to his possessions.

He has bought a small tractor and a tricycle.

Parts of his two-bedroom house of corrugated iron and wood now have concrete flooring and hollow block walls. It stands on a 240-square-meter space provided by the hacienda covered by a “home lot award.” This does not mean ownership; he cannot sell or mortgage it.

Dreams for a daughter

On the other hand, there’s Jose Valencia, 38, who took over a 1.2-ha plot at nearby Barangay Parang.

Like most farmers who seized parts of the 6,453-ha plantation in 10 barangays in Concepcion, La Paz and Tarlac City but did not have the money to cultivate the land, Valencia rented out his space for P6,000 pesos a year.

He left for himself a small garden. Here, he plants vegetables and earns P2,000 every two months for his produce. “Pantawid lang,” he says. It’s just for survival.

The future isn’t very good, he says.

“I do dream of better times, not for myself, but for my child,” this high school graduate says, pointing to his 7-year-old daughter. “I don’t want her to be like me.”

The bloody strike at Hacienda Luisita led to a review in May 2005 by the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) of the stock distribution option (SDO) under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

Expanding a Marcos decree under martial law that covered rice and corn lands, Aquino had promulgated CARP in June 1988—17 months after 13 peasants were massacred at Mendiola Bridge outside Malacañang in a protest demanding “genuine land reform.”

But a provision in the CARP law allowed corporations to distribute to tenant farmers shares of stocks instead of land.

The hacienda opted for this escape clause, along with owners of other major estates, among them the family of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s husband Jose Miguel Arroyo and business tycoons Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco and the late Roberto Benedicto.

Ms Arroyo herself had vowed to redistribute her husband’s 1,000-ha estate in Negros four months after she took power in 2001 to appease the impoverished constituency of President Joseph Estrada who mounted a violent protest against his ouster.

“I am not preaching communism. I am invoking Christian love and charity,” Ms Arroyo declared.

“True justice, development, democracy and reconciliation will not happen without the willingness of the elite to share or give up some of the wealth and power,” she said, using the language of revolutionaries agitating for social equality.

As in the case of Hacienda Luisita, the promise went unfulfilled.

Agrarian reform has become a major issue in the May 10 election, hounding Corazon Aquino’s son, Sen. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, who is running for president.

Over the past two decades, most of the 4.3 million ha distributed were public lands. Some 1.2 million ha of the most productive properties owned by powerful families remain intact through various corporate schemes.

They are now the subject of government acquisition under the latest incarnation of CARP, now called CARPER, extending agrarian reform for another five years and allocating P150 billion for it.

Noynoy Aquino abstained from the Senate vote on CARPER, along with his running mate in the Liberal Party, Sen. Manuel “Mar” Roxas II, whose family also is a wealthy landowner.

Disadvantageous

In September 2005, the DAR ordered the scrapping of Hacienda Luisita’s SDO for being “onerous and disadvantageous.” It said that farmers were misled that the arrangement—purportedly reached in a rigged referendum—would result in greater benefits.

The Cojuangcos went to the Supreme Court and secured a restraining order.

The Aquino family says that the DAR move was a reprisal after Corazon Aquino joined calls for the resignation of Ms Arroyo following the “Hello Garci” scandal in June 2005 that suggested she stole the 2004 vote, a charge she denies.

But as the case dragged on, private businessmen rented the lands the farmers had occupied and resumed planting sugarcane, which was processed in the Cojuangco mill.

Farmers suspect the investors were hacienda dummies, a charge denied by its managers.

Privation is evident in ramshackle houses in the twin villages of Mabilog and Parang, located five kilometers from the Luisita exit at the spanking new Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway (SCTEx) that cuts through nearly 100 ha of the hacienda.

The Bases Conversion Authority had acquired the easement at an overprice, say Aquino critics, that wasn’t shared with farmers, who owned 33 percent of the hacienda under the SDO deal.

Like a moonscape

The road from the SCTEx exit to the village is like a moonscape during summer. Residents say it is normally flooded and impassable during the rainy season.

There is just no comparison between Mabilog and the tree-shaded residential area of the Cojuangco property, called Las Haciendas, adjacent to a spectacular golf course. The gated and guarded community with wide boulevards is being developed like the upscale neighborhoods in Metro Manila.

Whatever progress is visible at Mabilog is a result of remittances from villagers who had gone overseas to work, say residents.

Studies conducted by economists and academics funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the German NGO GTZ have found that in general results of the agrarian reform program were positive.

“It has improved the well-being of the rural population and contributed to socioeconomic stability in the countryside,” says the GTZ study in 2006.

DAR surveys also showed that between 1990 and 2000, poverty incidence among the program’s beneficiaries declined from 47.6 to 45.2 percent. In contrast, during the same period, poor non-beneficiary households rose from 55.1 to 56.4 percent.

“The whole transition takes time and resources,” says Butch Olano, a former DAR undersecretary who is working with the activist group Task Force Mapalad (TFM). “If they are in place, the chance of having a greater impact on the quality of life is higher.” Funding of the first two decades of CARP came from recovered ill-gotten wealth from the Marcoses and their cronies and the sale of government assets.

Donor countries also have given the program substantial support since 1995.

JICA, the world’s largest source of official development assistance, provided technical and material assistance. Japanese agricultural and irrigation experts organized agrarian reform communities and helped develop farm-to-market roads, irrigation, post harvest facilities and markets.

“Improvement in land inequality is not just about advancing equity goals,” says respected economist Arsenio M. Balisacan. “It is also about raising the trajectory of income growth by improving overall economic efficiency.”

Not a problem but solution

Christian Monsod, a former chair of the Commission on Elections and TFM’s pro bono lawyer, says that the link between economic progress and reduction in poverty is no longer disputable.

“Agrarian reform is not part of the problem, it is part of the solution,” he says.

Monsod rues that the most productive lands have managed to resist or circumvent the law.

“The principle of agrarian reform is that the farmers must have the land and the landowner must be given just compensation. The corporate window does not do that. In fact, there was a compromise that we were suggesting at the time. Why don’t you give 3 percent ownership a year to the farmers. After 17 years, that’s 51 percent,” he says.

“The argument for the corporate window was that the farmers didn’t know how to manage a big enterprise. But surely after 17 years, they or their children would have known how to manage the enterprise,” Monsod says.

“We cannot address poverty mainly by education, by livelihood projects, by improving health and so on. These are what I would call income enhancement measures,” he says.

“You improve their income, you improve their health, and so they earn more. They get more educated and have more options. But the other part of the antipoverty program is the more equitable distribution of assets. And that’s mainly land. That is the structural change that we need.”

Restructure society now

Monsod points out that there are four asset reform programs of government—agrarian reform, urban land reform, ancestral land reform and fisheries reform.

The poorest of the poor are in these sectors with those in the fourth category, the municipal fishermen, probably worse off than the others.

The report card is poor on all four categories, he says, citing an economic analyst.

“For those who say that agrarian reform should be about agricultural productivity, certainly that helps in addressing poverty and inequalities, but that is longer term. We should be talking about changing the structure of our society today, using police power if necessary, because whether you like it or not, political power is based on economic power,” he says.

“And equitably diffusing political power and wealth for the common good is social justice under our Constitution.” –Fernando del Mundo Philippine Daily Inquirer