Explanatory Note to House Bill 3059 or Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill (GARB)

Republic of the Philippines
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Quezon City, Metro Manila

Fourteenth Congress
First Regular Session

HOUSE BILL NO. 3059

EXPLANATORY NOTE

Introduced by Anakpawis Partylist Representative CRISPIN “Ka Bel” B. BELTRAN,
Bayan Muna Reps. Satur Ocampo and Teodoro Casiño, and
Gabriela Women’s Party Reps. Liza Largoza-Maza and Luzviminda Ilagan

Social Justice! Liberation from feudal bondage! Land to the landless!

These are the demands of our landless farmers which this bill seeks to address. It seeks to implement genuine agrarian reform in order to finally realize for our farmers the promise embodied in Article II, Section 10 of our Constitution which provides that “The State shall promote social justice in all phases of national development” for which, as elaborated in its Article XIII, Section 1, Congress is mandated to “give highest priority to the enactment of measures that protect and enhance the right of all the people to human dignity, reduce social, economic, and political inequalities, and remove cultural inequities by diffusing wealth and political power for the common good”.

Our country has remained agricultural and our farmers are still the most numerous of our population. In toiling the soil to produce our most basic needs, our farmers serve as the backbone of our economy. Yet, in fulfilling this important economic role, they are the most exploited and oppressed.

Our farmers are exploited and oppressed because of land monopoly of a few landowners and foreign control of our lands whose origins are rooted in our colonial past. It started with the institution in our country of the encomienda system by the Spanish colonial regime, followed by the introduction of the hacienda and tenancy systems that have persisted to this day as the pillars of land monopoly. These property regimes set into historical motion the massive dispossession of the lands of our farmers that would later be entrenched by successive economic developments our country had undergone since the mid-19th century up to the present.

This has resulted in the landlessness of our farmers that now constitutes the fundamental problem of our country, a social injustice with all its ramifications of social, economic, and political inequalities that have deprived our landless farmers of human dignity. As such, it demands the highest priority of this Congress as mandated by our Constitution.

The magnitude of such landlessness can be seen in the fact that at the start of implementation of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), only 9,500 families, composing the biggest landowners of the country, own 20 % or 2,820,000 hectares of our agricultural lands. It is through such monopoly that widespread landlessness has spawned in our countryside which locks out our farmers from opportunities for decent livelihood. Thus, unemployment and poverty are high in the countryside as manifested by official statistics showing that 71 % of poor Filipinos live in the rural areas. In this raging poverty, they are further denied of access to education, health and other social services. Moreover, land monopoly imposes on our farmers various forms of feudal and semi-feudal exactions that enable a few landowners to accumulate the social product and the national wealth in their hands while our farmers are kept in bondage.

It is a fundamental problem that has not been resolved by all the agrarian reform programs implemented in this country, including the present CARP. Past agrarian reforms have failed because they were designed not as a social justice program but more as a program to protect the property rights of feudal landowners through the provisions of just compensation, exclusion, exemption and retention. Owing to the entrenched political power of the landowning class in this country, CARP unfortunately inherited this skewed concept of social justice and added its own array of measures further protecting the landed interests through deferment, non-distributive forms of land tenure such as the “stock distribution option” and, finally, through the provision allowing land use reclassification and conversion.

In protecting the interests of feudal landowners, it even proved flexible enough to be redesigned into a “market-oriented land reform” which primarily aimed to consolidate our lands and the labor of our farmers to meet the requirements for the globalization and liberalization of our agriculture. Since the country was ushered to membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), it is CARP, through its promotion of joint venture, lease and leaseback, agribusiness venture arrangements, corporative schemes and massive land use conversion, which serves as the battering ram for dismantling the barriers in accessing our agricultural lands for foreign investments, thereby dispossessing hundreds of thousands of our farmers. The polished accomplishment reports that DAR churns out each year can not hide the reality that most of the lands it claims to have distributed are not in the possession of their supposed beneficiaries because these lands have now come under the control of foreign and local agribusiness corporations or have reverted to the control of their former landowners.

The most recent of this process of redesigning CARP is the “reform the agrarian reform” policy of the Arroyo administration anchored on the proposal to extend the program for another ten years. As shown by the commitments of the Arroyo administration in the suspended RP-China Farms Agreement, the main content of the proposed extension is to accomplish where attempts to change the Constitution to allow 100 per cent foreign ownership of our lands have failed - the full-swing opening of our agricultural lands to foreign investments.

CARP, in its own right, is undermining our agriculture and small farmers which reinforce the destructive impact of globalization and liberalization. With fewer lands the program covered amid the high growth of the population in the countryside and the increase of landless farmers, CARP has caused the further fragmentation of our farm units which makes our small farmers even smaller and more economically vulnerable to the onslaught of foreign agricultural products brought about by the full liberalization of our agriculture. At present, our farmers survive the murderous competition on an average farm unit of 1.5 - 2 hectares, decreasing from the level of 3.5 hectares in the 1980s. But in many areas, the lands received by farmers from CARP are less than a hectare and most of these small plots are in marginalized lands. This testifies that CARP is ruining the viability of our farm units apart from the destruction that globalization and liberalization are inflicting on our agriculture. In a study conducted by the Project Development Institute, 30 out of 100 farmer-beneficiaries of CARP have abandoned their farms in the last five years because, to them, farming had ceased to be a viable occupation.

With the disintegration of our farms into less viable production units, coupled by the lack of support services, our agricultural production has remained backward. Some 48 % or 2.38 million of our farms, out of a total of 4.8 million, still rely on the plow, of which 42 % are not even owned by our farmers. Only 30 % or 2.9 million hectares of the total farm area in the country are irrigated which are in various degrees of deterioration. Losses are high because of low-level development of post-harvest facilities and farm-to-market roads. Production costs are high but our farmers do not have access to credit and production support. It is in this condition that our small farmers have been thrust by the government in the highly-competitive global arena of trade liberalization which has intensified the dumping of foreign agricultural products in the domestic market. Consequently, local agriculture is tottering on the brink of collapse due to the onerous weight of trade deficits, to the tune of $1.03 billion each year, it incurred since 1995. Our small farmers, by and large, are at the losing end of the uneven playing field of unbridled trade liberalization.
Today, contrary to the rosy statistics of the Department of Agrarian Reform, 70 % of our farmers do not own the land they till. In regions designated as “growth areas” (now, “super regions”), the rate of landlessness has risen to 80 %, the result of massive dispossession of farmers in favor of economic projects and programs designed to prettify the country for foreign investments. According to the 2002 Census on Agriculture, tenancy exists in 52 % of our farms, increasing from the level of 26 % in 1980, covering 51 % or some 4.8 million hectares of the total farm area. This indicates that all past and present agrarian reform programs of successive administrations have not only failed to address the problem of landlessness but even worsened it, amplifying and widening the social, economic, and political inequalities in the countryside in which the few big landowners are getting richer and their lands bigger while our farmers are getting poorer.

The social injustice our farmers have suffered does not only involve landlessness, poverty and the experience of frequent hunger. In their struggle to advance the cause of genuine agrarian reform and keep their lands from avaricious big landowners, speculators and foreign corporations, they have paid their dues in so many revolts which claimed the lives of their best sons and daughters. They have experienced political repression, hamletting, forced evacuations, abductions and other violation of their human rights. They were massacred, spanning from the Lapiang Malaya Massacre in the 1960s through Mendiola Massacre in 1987 and to the Hacienda Luisita Massacre in 2004. In the recent surge of extra-judicial killings, 176 of the more than 800 victims were farmers, farmer-activists, and agrarian reform advocates. In all these, they have not seen the light of penal justice.

It is in view of the foregoing that this bill is submitted. It aims to present an alternative agrarian reform program that picks on the lessons of the failure of previous agrarian reforms and stands on the hard experience of our farmers. These lessons and experience illustrate that genuine agrarian reform is the only way to end the centuries-old feudal bondage of our farmers.

Along this line, this bill seeks to enable the State to muster the political will to finally confront the fundamental problem of our society, break up land monopoly and foreign control of our lands, and implement free land distribution that will render social justice to millions of landless farmers in accordance with the policy direction mandated by our Constitution. It also aims to integrate the delivery of holistic support services to land distribution in order to raise the productivity of our farmers and increase their income and living standards. In proposing to implement genuine agrarian reform, this bill further seeks to lay the foundation for national industrialization and put the development of our economy on strong and sound fundamentals.

It is, therefore, earnestly requested that this bill be urgently approved.

(Sgd.)
Rep. Crispin B. Beltran
Anakpawis

(Sgd.)
Rep. Luzviminda C. Ilagan
Gabriela Women’s Party