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Issue Number 22, January 2003
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Kapatiran Issue
No. 22, January 2003
MILITANT PEASANT
REPORT:
"SCALING AND FILLETING" THE CARP
-Tim Howard
The core issue for peasant activists throughout the
Philippines - land reform - continued to dominate events
in 2002 for the peasant movement. Not surprisingly, the
14th anniversary of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform
Program (CARP) on June 10 was greeted with protests
throughout the country.
These protests echoed the previous month's May Day call
for the President's ouster by Kilusang Magbubkid ng
Pilipinas (KMP - the one-million strong Philippines
Peasants' Confederation), in which they claimed that
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA) was subservient to the US,
to big landlords and to the bourgeoisie, and anti-peasant
and anti-poor in her policies (KMP media release,
1/5/02).
For its part, the Macapagal-Arroyo administration
celebrated CARP's anniversary claiming to have exceeded
the year's target distribution of 100,000 hectares by
4,261 ha, and to have distributed the most number of
Certificates of Land Ownership (CLOAs) in any year of
CARP's history. Other sources, including Ang Bayan, the
Communist Party's newsletter, in its July 2002 edition,
indicated that this was simply wrong, and that this was,
in fact, the lowest number of annual CLOAs ever
distributed, the previous lowest being the 111,665 ha in
CARP's first year. Further, much of this land distributed
- some 35,000 ha - came not from private hands but from
public land, contrary to the Program's processes.
Filleting CARP - What's Inside?
Within that limited amount of land distribution, the GMA
administration has used a number of deceptive vehicles
that, in fact, kept power with the landlords and
disempowered peasant farmers.
The "Stock Distribution Option" was tagged as a
success by this Government for its implementation of
agrarian reform at the 'model" Hacienda Luisita in
Tarlac, where the peasants have to face brutal treatment
by the Army and private security forces, and starvation
from drastically cut work conditions.
Under the "Corporative Scheme", Eduardo
'Danding' Cojuangco supposedly distributed 4,361 ha in
Negros Occidental to his farmer tenants, but in fact gave
the lands to Eduardo Cojuangco & Sons Incorporated,
tenants each receiving a handful of shares in the
corporation.
In the "Cooperative Scheme" used by the same
Cojuangco in Isabela, farmers were forced to join a
"cooperative" by the province's governor
Faustino Dy jr, and contractually bound to plant cassava*
for Cojuangco (who is one of the very biggest landowners
in the Philippines). None of these schemes, joint
ventures of sorts between landlords and peasants,
amounted to fair redistribution of land. Control
inevitably remains with the landlords. * Cassava is a
tropical root crop. Ed.
A further scheme, often used since 1996 and approved by
the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), is currently
being vigorously promoted by the GMA administration. This
is the Voluntary Land Transfer/Direct Payment Scheme
(VLT/DPS). This is a vehicle to transfer lands not
necessarily to peasants but to "beneficiaries"
chosen by the landlords, like their own relatives. The
DAR merely provides official documentation and receives
transfer taxes. The Audit Management and Investigation
Committee of the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council
(AMIC-PARC) - a Government body - confirms that VLT/DPS
is now the scheme of choice of landlords to evade land
distribution under CARP (quoted in Ang Bayan, July 2002).
In some areas, like Pangasinan where Cojuangco has large
holdings, up to 95% of supposed CARP implementation is
effected through this scheme, the auditors say, and
significant proportions of people chosen by landlords as
"beneficiaries" were simply not qualified to
receive this land. AMIC-PARC gave the example of Iligan
City, where 26 "beneficiaries" were not farmers
nor intended to farm, nor even knew where the land was
located; these included longtime US residents, managers
and students.
As well, CARP already has a number of built-in loopholes,
which have enabled the landlords to claim exemptions from
the Program. These include enabling landlords to convert
their lands to other methods of land use - like export
crops, tourism, industrial, commercial and residential
projects - that are not covered by CARP. Already
orchards, fishponds, prawn and poultry farms, piggeries
and cattle ranches are exempt from CARP anyway.
Ineffective "Land Reform" Schemes
The dominant feudal and semi-feudal land tenure systems
in the Philippines, and the often-violent landgrabbing by
powerful landlords that set up those systems, have been
addressed over the years by various land reform schemes
in whose tradition CARP follows. Presidents to have
proclaimed "land reform" include Quezon's vague
"social justice" approach, Magsaysay's Land
Reform Act (1955), Diosdado Macapagal's Agricultural Land
Reform Code (1963) and Marcos' Presidential Decree 27
(1972). While being presented as ways of redistributing
land fairly, none of these actually effectively did so.
Rather, the illusion they created served to suppress
peasant resistance and reinforced landlord control. Seven
out of ten farmers now do not have land to till, 20% of
agricultural land is owned by 9,500 big landlords, not
including substantially bigger landholdings controlled by
capitalist interests (Ang Bayan, July 2002). Land reform
has not effectively happened at all. The GMA
administration is well in line with earlier presidencies.
The effectiveness (or not) of CARP is seen graphically in
the inaction on the President's promise in her State of
the Nation Address (SONA) in 2000 to ensure her husband's
family's vast landholdings in the province of Negros
Occidental are redistributed. The following year, on the
occasion of the 13th anniversary of CARP, the President
made a promise to "lead by example," by having
the lands owned by her husband's family (the Arroyos)
distributed to its tenants.
A case in point: lands in the Arroyo family's Hacienda
Manolita in Barangay Payao, Binalbagan, are eligible for
distribution to farmer-beneficiaries. The Philippine
Daily Inquirer (PDI, 14/6/02) quoted the Peace Foundation
and the Partnership for Agrarian Reform and Rural
Development Services (PARRDS) as calling on the DAR to
help the President to fulfill her promise. But the farm
administrator has said - according to the farmers - that
the land will never be distributed as the price is too
high for both Government and farmers. In the meantime,
the farmers live in abject poverty, given a maximum of
two days of work per week and "paid" 120 pesos
per day - although 90% of that limited pay is paid in
rice valued at 900 pesos a sack, rice the farmers say is
of very poor quality anyway (elsewhere, Ang Bayan quotes
the daily living standard for a family of six outside
Metro Manila as P396, or P12,000 per month).
When the President claimed, in her State of the Nation
address in July 2002, that huge amounts of land had been
distributed under CARP in the previous year, she was
challenged by many. Mario Espina, chair of the
Magsasakang Pinagbuklod sa Hacienda Fule (MPHF - the
peasant's association in Hacienda Fule, Laguna),
described this announcement as "just a public
relations gimmick for (the President's) 2004 political
ambitions" (media release 3/9/02). The "running
priest", Fr Robert Reyes, and some 100 Negros farmer
members of Task Force Mapalad (TFM - a farmers'
solidarity group) - including potential beneficiaries of
the land of Mike Arroyo (the President's husband) and
Eduardo Cojuangco - staged protest runs "For Land
and Life" through Bacolod City and Iloilo, to
"highlight the real situation of agrarian reform in
the province" (PDI, 29/7/02). In a ceremony in the
Malacaņang Presidential palace, on June 22, 2001, the
President and her husband had distributed token land
titles to farmer beneficiaries on Arroyo's land in Negros
and promised that the land distribution process would be
concluded by December 2001. This has not eventuated. The
protesters asked the whereabouts of the supposed 7,000 ha
handed out in Negros under CARP, saying the people had
not gained what she had claimed; and called on the
President to act on the plight of 1,759
farmer-beneficiaries in 5,000 hectares of Negros land
owned by Cojuangco, which he supposedly gave up for free
in 1998.
"Scaling" That CARP - Exposing The
Reality
On September 3, 2002, 100 farmers from the 197 ha
Hacienda Fule stormed the DAR office in Laguna, carrying
cooking pots to protest the illegal land use conversion
activities by the Ayala Corporation. In a media release
that day, Mario Espina (MPHF) said "Farmers in
Hacienda Fule are forced to do their farming 'in a pot'
because the land they formerly tilled freely was grabbed
by Ayala Land Corporation in their plans to convert the
lands into a first class residential subdivision and
tourism area," describing the historical and
contemporary injustices that the farmers were speaking
out against.
Land reform protests in Negros came to a head in late
October 2002, when 15 farmers staged a hunger strike in
front of the Provincial Agrarian Reform Office (PARO) in
Bacolod City. The PDI of October 25 reported that the
farmers, members of Task Force Mapalad (TFM), had by that
stage been camped in front of the office for over a week.
The protesters had received Certificates of Land
Ownership Award (CLOAs) for the 242 hectare Hacienda
Carmenchika in 1999 and the 61-hectare Hacienda Carmen
Grande in Pontevedra town, about 50 kilometres from
Bacolod, in 2000, according to the TFM. The land was in
the estate of the late Roberto Benedicto, a crony of
former dictator Ferdinand Marcos; his heirs prevented the
farmers taking possession, and the DAR was reluctant to
act. PARO chief, Felicidad Banares, told the protesting
farmers that she had asked the Department's head office
in Manila to expedite the resolution of the dispute. TFM
spokesperson, Rorie Fajardo, said the hunger strike would
go on until Agrarian Reform Secretary Hernani Braganza
addressed the farmers' demand.
'Anti-Terrorism' Rhetoric Endorses Landlords
Beyond the ineffectiveness and deceits of the CARP
mechanisms, military, police and militia are often used -
and violently so - against peasants seeking to break the
landlords' stranglehold on their lives. This could be
seen as a natural extension of the high level of
militarism in central government increasing under the
"anti-terrorism" rhetoric of recent months, and
of the GMA government's patronage of, and by, the elite.
Earlier in 2002 a Karapatan-Batangas fact-finding team
investigating abuses was itself detained and abused by
100 soldiers of Task Force Makiling. In April, a joint
letter from KMP and two local peasant groupings, Samahan
ng Magsasaka sa Batangas (SAMBAT) and Kalipunan ng
Samahang Magsasaka sa Timog Katagalugan (KASAMA-TK),
filed a complaint to the DAR and the Department of Local
and Interior Government (DILG) against Task Force
Makiling, which is guarding vast landholdings in
Batangas. These include the lands held by elite families
like the Roxas (who have some 8,500 ha in Batangas), the
Puyas and the Lopezes. The peasants complained of
continuous harassment and grave human rights abuses
perpetrated by the military and PNP (Philippines National
Police) personnel.
In a June 4, 2002, letter addressed to Agrarian Reform
Secretary, Hernani Braganza, the Director for Operations
of the National Police Commission, Ricardo F De Leon,
responded to that complaint: "It appears that there
was no case of harassment or abuse committed by Task
Force Makiling and PNP personnel. The presence of [these
groups] is to neutralise terrorist activities of the New
People's Army and other Dissident Terrorist groups
operating in these areas".
Rafael Mariano, KMP Chairperson, in a media release of
June 20, 2002, calling on the Defense Secretary, Gen.
Angelo Reyes, and Army Chief, Lt. Gen. Cimatu, to court
martial Task Force Makiling Commanding Officer Col. Efren
Orbon and the entire Task Force, denounced such "Red
baiting".
"The intensified militarisation in the countryside
has claimed many peasant victims. State-perpetrated
terrorism and violence in the guise of civilian security,
protection and 'war against terrorism' have been launched
against farmers who have been fighting for their right to
land and life".
In Isabela Province, Cojuangco's landgrabbing Cassava
Plantation Project, intended to cover 150,000 ha - 15% of
the province's total land area - is being actively
supported by militaristic Governor Faustino Dy's purchase
of huge amounts of weaponry for civilian bureaucrats. In
April 2002, another fact-finding mission of peasant,
church and environmentalist groups had confirmed that the
vast majority of farmers and residents opposed the
Project. According to KMP's Rafael Mariano, "The
move (to purchase weapons) is another excuse to quell and
quash the legitimate opposition of the people by
responding through another military solution to the
problem... It is simple economics, that genuine agrarian
reform is the foundation of genuine economic development
and industrialisation" (media release, 24/6/02).
The GMA - Landlord Memorandum
Stepping up the pressure on peasants in August 2002,
while revealing the true nature of the links between CARP
and the Government's militarisation, Secretary Braganza
announced a Joint Memorandum between the DAR, the DILG,
and the Department of National Defense (DND). Braganza
described the Memorandum as providing in advance the
plans for the military and police to assist the
implementation of CARP, in what others might see as deep
irony, given that CARP is purported to help the peasants.
KMP's response to the Memorandum was a bitter one.
Mariano again: "CARP is in fact, a
counter-insurgency programme or an instrument for
deception coupled with political repression against
peasants. This will only legitimise the landlords'
employment of the military, police and para-military
groups to protect their landholdings and economic
interest, like what Eduardo "Danding" Cojuangco
did in San Miguel Corporation's cassava project area in
the 11 towns of Isabela province" (26/8/02).
In a useful analysis of CARP, Mariano continued:
"CARP's failure does not primarily lie with the
strong resistance of landlords against it. CARP itself is
a farce and was eventually used by landlords to evade
land confiscation and distribution. The absence of a
genuine and thoroughgoing land reform is one of the root
causes of the armed conflict in the countryside. The
implementation of a genuine land reform or the breaking
up of the landlords' monopoly of lands and their
subsequent free distribution to the landless is the key
to achieving a just and lasting peace".
CARP, The Military And The Landlords
KMP later claimed that 95% of DAR decisions in relation
to CARP favoured the landlords and corporations. They
released figures on August 27, 2002, that indicate how
land use conversion, the peasants' ejection off their
lands and DAR inaction affected peasant families in
militarised areas:
• First phase of Cojuangco's Cassava Plantation
Project, Isabela - 29,000 has. - 20,000 peasant-families
affected;
• Clark Development. Corporation Tourism Project,
Clark Field, Pampanga- 31,894 has. - 50,000 families;
• Cojuangco's "corporative scheme" in
Negros - 4,000 has. - 3,000 families;
• Hacienda Looc Harbortown Project in Nasugbu,
Batangas - 8,650 has. -15,000 families;
• Greggy Araneta lands in San Jose Del Monte,
Bulacan - 1,000 has. - 300 families;
• Lakeshore Dev't. Corp. in Mexico, Pampanga - 155
has. - 300 families.
"The DAR, under Braganza, will now serve as an
apparatus of the Macapagal-Arroyo government's State
terrorism and political repression," according to
the KMP. Braganza's role as a Government negotiator in
the peace talks with the National Democratic Front (NDF)
was seen as severely compromised by this memorandum which
linked him intimately with the repressive military
leadership.
Rod Flores, chair of the Alyansa ng Magbubukid ng Gitnang
Luzon (AMGL - the Alliance of Peasants in Central Luzon),
said landlords like Eduardo "Danding" Cojuangco
Jr. are the principal beneficiaries of the accord.
"The joint circular is actually a GMA-Cojuangco
accord. This would legitimise Cojuangco's practice of
employing military and police to evade genuine land
distribution," Flores announced at a press
conference in Quezon City on August 30, 2002.
(Ka Rod died in a car accident on the rocky mountain
roads of Aurora on October 17, during his ceaseless work
in campaigns for genuine agrarian reform. Mabuhay, Ka
Rod!).
Privatising The Army
In a dramatic protest on September 18, more than 100
farmers stormed the DND in Batangas, laying a military
uniform "filled with blood" in front of Camp
Aguinaldo "to demonstrate the Macapagal-Arroyo
government's State-led terrorism against the peasantry
and the Filipino people". Their focus was on
military personnel who were functioning as Cojuangco's
private army, some being accused of actually being on his
payroll.
SAMBAT, a key peasant organisation in Batangas, described
military detachments built inside the 1,500 hectares of
sugar land, covering nine barangays (administrative
districts. Ed.) in Balayan, Batangas, that Cojuangco was
seizing from farmers and sugar workers. "The General
Headquarters is directly giving orders and is primarily
responsible for all the military atrocities happening in
the first district of Batangas. It virtually turned the
sugar bowl of Batangas into a killing field," SAMBAT
spokesperson Gigi Bautista said after the protest (media
release, 18/9/02).
So Who Benefits?
Any pretence by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo that her
Administration has benefited the peasantry under CARP and
related programmes are clearly just that - pretence. The
GMA administration, as with its predecessors, continues
to enforce the old land tenure systems and to support the
real beneficiaries, the landlords and the corporations,
in a similar way that they support foreign capital and
for US "anti-terrorist" interests.
The connection between CARP and the presence of the US
military on Philippines soil again is not lost on the
militant peasant movements. Fidel Castro (no, not that
Fidel Castro. Ed.), of the Solidarity of Peasants Against
US Intervention (STOP US Intervention), in a media
release on September 18, said the DAR-DILG-DND Memorandum
further exposed CARP as a counter-insurgency programme
that would only result in the escalation of rampant human
rights abuses in the countryside.
Tim Howard is a PSNA member living in Whangarei
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