TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS after the Philippine government launched agrarian reform in 1988 as its paramount social justice program, a significant majority of Filipino farmers have yet to own the land that they have been tilling for ages.
Innumerable problems, not least of them land survey issues, resistance from landowners, problematic documents and titles, and concerns of agrarian reform beneficiaries, keep pulling back results to insignificant numbers and impact.
Poverty remains the scourge of more than 1 in every three farmers, who count among the poorest of the poor sectors of the nation.
Fishermen, farmers, and children have consistently posted the highest poverty incidence among the nine basic sectors in the Philippines in 2012 — at 39.2 percent, 38.3 percent, and 35.2 percent, respectively — according to the National Statistical Coordination Board.
The three sectors, including the self-employed and unpaid family workers and women, have higher poverty incidence rates than the general population estimated at 25.2 percent in 2012, NSCB said.
Huge backlog
Indeed, a generation and seven years after its launch, agrarian reform’s backlog remains huge, and seemingly insurmountable.
The Congressional Policy and Budget Research Department of the House of Representatives, citing data from the Department of Agrarian Reform, reported that as of July 1, 2009, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) “has yet to distribute the remaining balance of 1.6 million hectares to 1.2 million farmer beneficiaries.”
“Of the remaining balance, 60.08 percent (965,798 hectares) were private agricultural lands and 4.28 percent (68,863 hectares) are non-private agricultural lands under the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR),” it added.
Meanwhile, as of the same date, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) “has a remaining balance of 572.902 hectares to be distributed to 645,443 farmer beneficiaries.”
In 2009, CARP’s life was extended by CARPER, or the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reform. It received a budgetary support of at least P150 billion but also hardly improved land reform’s accomplishment numbers by leaps and bounds.
From July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2014, CARPER “has distributed a total of 1,052,259 hectares of land to 897,648 farmer beneficiaries of which 43.2 percent (454,134 hectares) are public arable and disposable lands and 22.1 percent (232,400 hectares) are privately owned lands.”
Yet still, “most of the distributed privately owned land are classified as voluntary land transfers (VLT), which is around 119,660 hectares, and only 48,184 ha. (4.6 percent) were distributed through compulsory acquisition.”
DENR on the other hand “distributed a total of 469,268 hectares arable and disposable lands to 549,169 farmer beneficiaries.”
A big balance of land for acquisition and distribution to farmers remains after 27 years of land reform, a period spanning the rule of the first to the second Aquino administrations.
As of June 30, 2014, the report said DAR has yet to distribute a total of 726, 421 hectares.
Compulsory vs. voluntary
By land type, lands under compulsory acquisition pose the biggest challenge at around 479,488 hectares or 66 percent of the total land left for distribution, even as the balance of voluntary offer to sell lands remain at only 112,681 hectares (15.5 percent).
The regions with the biggest land balance for distribution are those with significant hacendado and political clan presence — the Western Visayas, the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, ARMM, the Bicol Region, SOCCKSARGEN (South Cotabato, Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat, Sarangani, and General Santos City, Eastern Visayas, Cagayan Valley.
CARP under the implementation of the DENR has yet to distribute a total of 33,171 hectares of public arable and disposable lands.
As of June 30, 2014, Agrarian Reform Secretary Virgilio de los Reyes, in testimony before Congress, said the following issues hound “problematic landholdings” under agrarian reform:
* ARB (agrarian reform beneficiaries0 Issues, 14,094 cases
* Basic Document Infirmities, 31,294
* Coverage Issues, 24,824
* For Reconstitution of Title, 29,001
* For Reissuance of Lost ODC of Title, 4,045
* Landowner Issues, 34,294
* LBP (LandBank of the Philippines) Issues, 2,456
* Peace and Order Issues, 6,717
* Survey Issues, 43,978
Government helpless?
Social justice through agrarian reform remains an elusive promise to a great number of Filipino farmers.
But most tragic of all, even the combined resources of national government agencies have sometimes proved useless, in the face of fierce landlord resistance to land reform.
A curious case in point is that of the coconut farmers of Hacienda Matias in Bondoc Peninsula, Quezon province.
The property is a coconut plantation in San Francisco, Quezon province, which spans 1,715.983 hectares. In December 2014, the government awarded Certificates of Land Ownership Awards (CLOAs) to a total of 283 agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) of Hacienda Matias.
An “inter-agency task force” composed of the DAR, Commission on Human Rights (CHR), Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), Department of Justice (DOJ), and the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC), with support from the Philippine National Police (PNP), and Philippine Army, was formed to install the ARBs on May 15, 2015.
The pooled might and resources of government’s civilian agencies and uniformed agencies failed to achieve that. The owners of Hacienda Matias resisted, backed by armed men they have deployed across the hacienda’s perimeters, rendering the farmers’ CLOAs paper without weight or worth.
“Aanhin namin ang CLOA kung wala naman kami doon sa lupa,” Maribel Ausa Luzara, president of the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Bondoc Peninsula (KMBP), told the PCIJ. She is one of the 283 CLOA holders of Hacienda Matias.
Luzara said all the points of agreement that the farmers have forged with the “task force” of national agencies prior to ARBs’ installation inside Hacienda Matias did not come to fruition.
The task force’s failure has prompted the farmers to pitch camp in front of the national headquarters of DAR in Quezon City a fortnight ago.
Should the next attempt of the interagency task force to install the Hacienda Matias farmers fail again, Luzara said the KMBP members plan to just return their CLOAs to DAR en massé.
Inertia, areglo
In the view of National Anti-Poverty Commission Secretary Jose Eliseo M. Rocamora, “inertia” seems to hound a number of government’s programs, including its asset reform initiatives like agrarian reform.
NAPC, Rocamora said, has been assisting the KMBP farmers in their quest for land and in “pressuring” the DAR to make good on its promise of successful installation.
“Pinaka-importanteng obstacle ng mga programa ng gobyerno, asset reform man ‘yan o iba ay inertia. Either binayaran ang bureaucrat o takot makasuhan,” Rocamora told reporters in a press briefing on June 2, 2015.
[Inertia is the most significant obstacle to government's programs. It's either the bureaucrat has been bribed or threatened with cases.]
In jest, he added, the problem is public officials have to deal with “criminal law, civil law, at areglo (compromises).”
The Philippine Network of Food Security Programmes (PNFSP) and the Kilusan ng Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (KMP) have repeatedly pointed out a simple farmer to land ratio 27 years since CARP was enacted. Until now, seven of ten farmers in the Philippines still do not own the land they are tilling.
CARP’s backlog triggered the passage of Republic Act No. 9700, Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reform (CARPER), which extended the Land Acquisition and Distribution (LAD) program for another five years ending June 30, 2014.
A study commissioned by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in 2011 titled: “Commercial pressures on land in Asia: An overview,” CARP had included in its implementation schemes “such as the voluntary land transfer (VLT) provided a convenient solution for landed families to keep their lands.”
“The new law (CARPER) eliminated the VLT scheme and made compulsory acquisition the primary mode of acquisition. Despite the extension and adaptation of CARP, much opposition is expected from landed elites who wield power over government policies,” the IFAD study, funded in cooperation with the International Land Coalition (ILC), read in part.
Agrarian Reform Commission
Amid the still significant backlog of agrarian reform beyond the life of both CARP and CARPER, Rep. Leni Gerona-Robredo of Camarines Sur and Rep. Kaka J. Bag-ao of Dinagat Islands have introduced House Bill No. 4375, which seeks to create an Agrarian Reform Commission.
“It is, therefore, necessary for this purpose to create an independent Commission with legal powers of subpoena and of contempt, and with the cooperation of other relevant government agencies, to review the actual accomplishments of CARP/CARPER and to investigate circumventions and violations of the law and cause these lands to be compulsory acquired and distributed to qualified beneficiaries,” the proposed bill’s explanatory note read in part.
Groups of farmers aligned with Sulong CARPER coalition have expressed support for the bill, saying the “landed elite have maneuvered to make circumventions (in CARP/CARPER) possible.”
Sulong CARPER is a national multi-sectoral alliance led by peasants and religious groups. The KMBP is a member-organization of the alliance.
Luzara of the Hacienda Matias farmers’ group said Congress must ensure that government will crackdown on such circumventions by passing HB 4375. – With reporting and research by Cong B. Corrales, PCIJ, June 2015