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PASSAGE
of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP),
along with its enabling law in 1988, was accelerated by
the fatal shooting of 13 farmers in January 1987 on the
road to Malacañang. The so-called Mendiola Massacre
climaxed the centuries-old struggle of Filipino farmers
who have been given little or no chance to own the land
they tilled.
Landlessness had sparked numerous uprisings—from
spontaneous peasant revolts against Spanish hacienderos
to the still ongoing, Maoist-led rural insurgency. The
CARP was thus promoted as the main remedy to peasant
restiveness and as a stimulus for agricultural growth.
Then-President Corazon Aquino held up the CARP as the
“centerpiece program” of her administration.
Twenty
years later, the government’s land-reform effort has
fallen woefully short of its goals—by some 1.3 million
hectares of private farmland. To some critics, nothing
exemplifies this failure more than the fact that the
country’s biggest sugar-cane plantation has remained
firmly under the control of the family of the
ex-president who signed the CARP into law.
Now,
Congress is deliberating on whether or not to extend the
life of the CARP by five more years. Proponents of the
various bills to do so have put forward several
arguments, which Akbayan Party-list Rep. Risa
Hontiveros-Baraquel summed up when she said that “the
hunger and poverty being experienced in the countryside
is directly linked to the problem of landlessness.”
Even the
Catholic hierarchy, in pursuit of the Church’s
social-justice agenda, has voiced its support for the
CARP’s extension—on the condition that the new law
contain “reformist” amendments. Unfortunately, what
changes in the land reform law the bishops have in mind
have not been amply reported, which brings us to the
crux of the matter.
Land
reform, as in the case of Meiji Japan or post-1949
Taiwan, succeeded in not just parceling out farms to
landless peasants. Moreover, it liberated capital that
had previously been locked in vast estates and turned it
into the wherewithal that fueled commercial and
industrial growth—with positive consequences for those
two countries, which have grown spectacularly affluent
over the years.
A
similar objective had been sought by the early
proponents of the CARP. Two decades later, however,
there is little evidence that the conversion of the
landholdings, which the program managed to cover, has
stimulated business development to any significant
degree.
Actually, land reform as a government program is much
older than the 20-year-old CARP. In 1972 then-President
Ferdinand Marcos issued Presidential Decree 27, which
sought to distribute rice and corn farms to landless
farmers. Thirty-six years and an estimated P200 billion
later, what has the official effort to “give land to the
tillers” achieved?
Opponents of land reform present a persuasive case when
they point out that chopping up agricultural estates
into plots of three hectares or less for distribution to
farmers with little or no access to farming inputs and
loans has only resulted in a sharp decline in farm
productivity.
Then
there is the matter of official commitment to the
program—or rather, the lack of it. Frequently cited is a
study in Negros Occidental, which showed that 97 percent
of agrarian-reform beneficiaries (ARBs) have received no
government support services, that 41 percent of ARBs
have either abandoned or sold the rights to the land
awarded to them under the CARP, that 98.6 percent of
ARBs have not paid land taxes, etc. Moreover, Negros
Occidental has remained a hotbed of insurgent activity.
The
overall picture that the statistics present is a program
long on promises but short on delivery. The CARP has
neither quelled rural restiveness nor stimulated farm
productivity. Its critics invariably point out that the
history of land reform has coincided with the steady
deterioration of the country’s ability to feed itself.
As if
all that were not enough, suspicions of widespread
corruption hang like the proverbial dark cloud over the
bureaucracy tasked with implementing land reform. From
the very start the program has been tainted with this
original sin.
No less
than a top agrarian reform official in the Aquino
administration was linked to a multimillion-peso scam
involving a plantation in Bicol. That nothing has come
out of the investigation into the case merely reinforced
the notion that the CARP is yet one more source of
graft.
If the
law is to be extended at all, let the CARP’s
accomplishments—or lack thereof—over the last two
decades come under objective, dispassionate scrutiny.
Let our lawmakers determine if the CARP is suitable for
our national requirements—and not just a knee-jerk,
bleeding-heart response to a centuries-old problem which
affects a portion of the population that is rapidly
decreasing anyway as a result of urbanization.
Let us
review, too, the experience of other countries, which
had once faced a situation similar to ours. For one,
Taiwan—long a model touted by land-reform advocates—has
begun to reverse its parcelization of farms and is now
moving toward the consolidation of more cost-efficient
integrated agricultural estates.
Could it
be that the “hunger and poverty in the countryside”
result from factors other than landlessness? Is it
possible that the CARP has outlived its usefulness?
Land
reform was a noble, magnificent battle cry when it was
first raised at a time that is obviously no more. What
we need now are facts—not slogans. |
