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CATHOLIC
bishops on Sunday called for a review of the law that
created the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program
(CARP), saying that it failed to benefit poor farmers
and even perpetuated class division despite its almost
20-year existence.
“The law
was defective in the first place, emasculated [from] the
very beginning in a landlord-dominated Congress, further
watered down in its implementation.
At this
stage, a year before the scheduled end of the program,
there is much that has not been done and the general
situation of our farmers is still as bleak as ever,”
said the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines
(CBCP) in a pastoral statement Sunday.
The
bishops, who on Sunday ended their three-day plenary
assembly, criticized the government’s “poor
implementation” of the CARP, which they said “mirrors
the still overpowering opposition of the landed classes
(who are) the traditional political and economic elite
of our country.”
“That
selfish unconcern in turn relates into sheer neglect of
the poor, an utter disregard of the dignity of a whole
class merely because of their bad economic plight,” said
the clergy’s pastoral statement, read by Bataan Bishop
Socrates Villegas before reporters.
CBCP
vice president Antonio Ledesma said the bishops decided
to make their position known on the land reform issue
based on inputs from some members of the clergy and
farmers who were requested to talk at their plenary
assembly.
Still,
despite the CARP being “defective,” the bishops believed
that it should be completed by 2008.
“We ask
that the CARP, defective as it is, be finally completed
next year as it has been targeted. And if it is not
sufficiently implemented by then, the program should be
further extended and funded more seriously and
generously. But we asked that the law itself must be
reviewed and improved,” said the bishops.
Signed
by President Corazon Aquino in 1988, Republic Act 6657
called for a genuine land reform program to benefit
farmers toiling for years for landed classes.
The CBCP
also called for a revival of the 1967 Rural Congress,
when the clergy reached a conclusion that rural areas
were the most neglected by government’s development
programs and the Church’s pastoral care.
“We
propose that we revive the memory of that congress by
holding one again this year. But this time our farmers
must do that speaking by themselves, the discerning, the
proposing of their own ideas, the planning of how we
must as a people come together to work for the common
good of the country and of ourselves,” said the bishops.
The CBCP
said society’s “disregard” for the human rights of the
poor accounts for the numerous extrajudicial killings of
farmers, both by the military and the communist rebels.
The farmers’ only crime, the bishops said, “is their
continuing struggle for agrarian reform or their
inability to pay the revolutionary tax demanded of them
by the NPA (New People’s Army).” |
