Aquino urged to implement agrarian reform

REDISTRIBUTING property rights through agrarian reform is a key policy direction that should be taken by the new administration of President-apparent Benigno Aquino III to help the country adapt to climate change, experts on land and asset reform said at a recent conference.

The “National Conference on Asset Reform and Climate Change” organized by the Project Development Institute, a nongovernment organization (NGO) advocating agrarian reform, and the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), on Wednesday called on the incoming Aquino administration to reverse the effects and impact of climate change by reshaping government policies toward the rural poor who are most vulnerable to the vagaries of the environment.

James Putzel, director of the Crisis States Research Center at the London School of Economics who has done extensive studies on land reform in the Philippines, said a rise in the sea level threatens the livelihoods and survival of 70 percent of the country’s 1,500 seaside municipalities along the Philippines’ 32,000-kilometer discontinuous coastline, one of the longest in the world.

Climate change also will affect access to and management of fresh water and likely aggravate the impact of natural disasters on the country, and cause declines in agricultural production, he said.

Agrarian Reform Undersecretary Narciso Nieto said the agency is “thinking about recasting” its strategy on building agrarian-reform communities to meet the effects of climate change and “how this will shape the overall nature and priorities of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.”

He said climate change will prove costly to investments already made on water impounding systems and communal irrigation which were not built to withstand the expected increased demand for household consumption during the El Niño months or the expected large volumes of rain during the monsoon season.

Climate change also will render upland communities vulnerable to landslides during the rainy season and to bush and forest fires during the dry spells, he said.

In addition, entrants or migrants fleeing the deadly effects of climate change in their areas will create tension and pressure on communities they decide to settle in. Such conflicts can now be seen in the Bicol region, Mindoro, Negros and Central and Northern Mindanao, Nieto said.

The challenges from climate change confronting the country “are highly political, deeply connected to immediate problems of poverty,” Putzel said.

The challenges also “raise immediate issues of national policy in relation to strategies for agricultural and industrial production and redistributive reform, not the least of which is agrarian reform,” he said.

“Climate-change adaptation measures need, first and foremost, to reduce the vulnerability of both communities and production systems to the instabilities of climatic conditions,” he said.

This entails the “distribution and redistribution of land rights” to encourage investments and improvements on the land and gain access to credit lines to finance them, he said.

“We have long known that small holders deal better with the microclimates that characterize farming everywhere and in conditions of capital scarcity they make better use of labor and land than do large farm operators,” he said.

He said the country needs a new kind of agribusiness that will move away from the practices of the old landed elites in the Philippines as exemplified by the Aquino family-run Hacienda Luisita that merely retain their vast landholdings without developing high-value agricultural production, seek niche markets for Philippine products abroad, promote food processing and boost agricultural exports.

The country needs an agribusiness industry that “combines the energies of small producers, cooperatives and entrepreneurs willing to deploy new technologies and take risks,” he said.

“The President-elect could demonstrate that his government represents generational change by setting an example and convincing his family to finally put the story of Hacienda Luisita behind them, change it from a story of land held in violation of successive legal efforts to redistribute it and from a story of successive protests and even killings to put down social mobilization, to a story of justice and forward- looking development,” Putzel said.

“The question now is whether the threats posed by climate change will be enough to provoke the formation of a new coalition that rises above family interests, narrow class interests—whether of capital or labor—local community interests, to take the necessary risks and launch the long-term program required to make the country as a whole more productive and in ways that are environmentally sustainable,” he said.

Ria Teves, executive director of the Project Development Institute, proposed several immediate steps to address climate change through asset reforms.

She pushed for the recasting of the government’s agrarian-reform policy by incorporating the threat of climate change so that the new agrarian-reform strategy would involve the agrarian reform beneficiaries and their organizations and NGOs in land tenure improvement and economic support services to develop livelihoods while considering environmental mitigation and adaptation measures.

There should also be bottom-up consultations with the communities concerned that involve the beneficiaries, the DAR and other stakeholders, she said.

The new strategy and new models on dealing with climate change should then be presented for adoption by the incoming government and the international community that provides development assistance for agrarian reform. –Manila Standard Today