Access to Land and Social Justice in the Philippines

The search for social justice in the Philippine agrarian reform (on policy) and land reform (on land struggle of the farmer communities) would apparently be harder in the future, as it leaves to date an indication of increasing disparity in land tenures system between the vulnerable majority of farmer communities and the powerful, few landlords. Few changes did comparatively take place, however, despite the government's program of comprehensive agrarian reform (CARP) that has been fought for at least 15 years since the law was passed in 1989 and earlier marked with more optimism.

In general at national level, contrasting the results of land transfer claimed by the government actors and by the social actors working on it, it is safe to say that the minimum of about seventy percent of the working scope of the agrarian reform may be viewed as a fair failure cases, otherwise “half-successful”. The accomplishment data released by the Philippine government refer particularly to the government’s implementation of land transfer to the farmer beneficiaries, emphasizing about 80 percent of land reform’s working scope has been successfully achieved. The data yet hide the necessary post-land transfer programs that are supposed to be sufficiently implemented.

Out of two case studies comparing two provinces, which typically mark the structural characterization of the Philippine rural society, i.e. Tarlac province in Central Luzon that the government claimed to have accomplished over 100 percent of the agrarian reform working scope, and Negros Occidental province of Western Visayas, having reached among the lowest accomplishment, one could see the results of the agrarian reform program may be considered as simply in a dichotomy as weighed against the claim of the close-to-farmer agents of the land reform in the Philippines, i.e. the NGOs. The latter claim only of the maximum of five percents out of about less than 30 provinces in which they have been working with the farmer communities since at least the initial stage of CARP implementation. The success is distinctly understood in term of the integration of the post-land transfer programs, which mostly being neglected by the government.

As for the dichotomy, a disparaging point of the two actors, i.e. state and social, comes across in the juncture of understanding in this research that ——referring to both selected provinces—— where the government claims of relative success, the NGOs claim otherwise. Negros Occidental’s experience is admitted among the “success” by the NGOs (in term of the farmer movements so far), while the government’s accomplishment data show it is among the lowest. Most deem it proper that Negros Occidental and Tarlac’s experiences in land and agrarian reform typically represent an honest recognition for understanding the agrarian reform accomplishment in the Philippines.

Comparing the movements of the farmers in their struggle for land and agrarian reform in each provinces, even though both having strong civil society movements, with Tarlac recently more fervently characterized by the presence of the remnants of communist approach while Negros Occidental with more NGOs and farmer organizations ——many are ex-communists transforming themselves into working together with the government—— one should find out from the history of each that distinguishes the performance of the provinces. Tarlac has more concentrated power of the fewer elite, well linked with the central power of the country as compared to Negros Occidental that has lesser direct association with the post-Marcos Malacañang regimes and their allies yet having scores of land owners, many are fairly not less strong.

In Tarlac, pressures and oppression by the elite’s allies involving the military have rendered the struggle of farm workers for improvement much harder in determining their political choices. The irony becomes stronger as the province is the power base of the former president of Corazon Aquino who passed the agrarian reform law before the program was initiated. The recent incident of killing of at least seven farmers by the military late 2004 tells a lot about the apparently helplessness of pushing through such scheme of agrarian revolution in the Philippines nowadays. The dead end of the labor relation game does not match against the possible opportunities offered by agrarian reform program that is supported by the social actors of the society in taking option to rely on the agrarian reform law. This opportunity balance was apparently used by the local government to move quick yet brief to transfer at least the lands, which is undoubtedly as hastily as providing farmers with official papers, practices that later bring about the post-land transfer program to be quite unattended.

While in Negros Occidental, land reform implementation cases show the intimate links among the civil society and the central government unusually involve the military to help pursue the farmers’ causes on behalf of the agrarian law. Such case is uncommon and therefore could hardly be considered as a pattern for other experience, considering so many other similar cases remain unresolved in the Philippines. In addition, the many land owners’ interests in the province over large tracts of sugar plantations and rampant graft of local politics have not allowed the performance of the local government to even show a report of less high accomplishment of land reform and post-land transfer programs implementation. It infers that the mushrooming NGOs in the province have comparatively much helped to control the balance.

Negros Occidental case study on farmer movements in the last decade show that even though the government has awarded farmer beneficiaries with certificates of land transfer, landlords and their sugar company managements applied all means to retain the lands much longer. The real acquiring and cultivating of the targeted lands of the beneficiaries, therefore, was dragged until a good deal of time later only after it was tediously conducted a careful, full-scale networking between social and state actors in addition to the physical assistance of the military along with the active direct engagement of the farmers themselves.

At national level, the high accomplishment period of the land transfer program implementation was also mainly characterized by the dominance of the central government’s role during a certain period of 1993-1994, particularly when the secretary of the Department of Agrarian Reform was a less politically minded but having strong office management prowess. Working together with the civil society actors of the NGOs, the programs were strongly pushed along with the movements of the farmer communities in the targeted areas. However, this period seems to be a particular case, as compared to tenures of other secretaries, who mostly held political interests not for the farmers. There was also a case when a secretary had to be toppled down after strong team working of different parties behind farmer social movement propelled from the center in capital down to diverse regions in the Philippines.

Another striking feature of the agrarian reform program accomplishment in the Philippines could be inferred from the leading role of the government in crushing the powers that are against their interests. The Philippine political history that is marked by frequent social upheavals, many conducted by the farmer communities along with the armed leftist struggles, has had to involve the government’s force, particularly when the latter really holds the concern to make the programs a success whatever rampant negative interests they may have in politics. After the agrarian law was passed in 1989, the government is noted in the public records to have intensely suppressed the communist movements of the New People’s Army (CPP-NPA). In the mid-1990s (1993-1997), however, the insurgency practically stopped as the agrarian reform program quickly but briefly proceeded in the country. After 1998 onwards the NPA movement has been back strong to further challenge the government’s programs for rural development. The insurgency advances in 2003 and now in 2004 it has reached higher level of physical contacts between the armed left and the government’s military apparatuses that in many cases pitted the farmers in between. As compared to the early period of the CARP implementation, this development may seriously hamper the continuation of the agrarian reform program in the future.

The prospect of the program would apparently still proceed at turtle pace as the gap between the rural and the urban life remains ever increasing in the last decade particularly since mid-1990s. On one hand, though literacy rate of the Philippine population and other human resource development are generally high, they does not seem to affect the performance of rural development. On the other, comparing the development of public companies registered in 2004 and 1994, in Negros Occidental, for instance, which performs low rural improvement as seen in its agrarian reform accomplishment, it has shown instead a relatively fast development of among 5,000 biggest companies in the Philippines. To add the picture not less depressing, this province is also marked by the increasing number of the cities in such gloomy economic situation of rural areas of the island, as compared to the many provinces in the country, including Tarlac in Central Luzon that has only three cities since. The formation of new cities in Negros Occidental does not match with the development of rural population of 57% during the last decade. This supposes an even wider inequality in Negros Occidental. On the other side, with the opposite tendency as compared to the latter, the urban population in Tarlac, having fewer cities, increased only slightly higher as compared to rural population changes. In Negros, comparatively speaking then, while there are big companies in the nearby cities, people would possibly still again witness hunger in between large sugar plantations, as in the past, while the main imbalance of social structure remains unchanged.***