Crisis in the countryside
The peasant masses are battered by intense poverty. They are besieged by hunger and stricken with various epidemics. Infants, the youth and the elderly die of starvation and disease. Sources of livelihood in the countryside have further dwindled; still, affluence eludes those who migrate to the cities.
This miserable condition afflicting the peasant masses is further aggravated by policies that are patently pro-imperialist and anti-peasant. To cover up for this, the reactionary state blames droughts and successive typhoons for the chronic crisis in the countryside.
Anti-peasant policies
The Estrada regime's policies of liberalization, deregulation and privatization perpetuate and aggravate crisis and suffering in the countryside. For the peasantry, this means nothing else but the further concentration of land in the hands of a few and the intensification of feudal and semifeudal exploitation. Foreign capitalists, local compradors and landlords are able to plunder the country's natural and human resources with abandon because of these policies.
The object of the sham Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL) enacted by the Aquino regime was to reinforce the monopoly ownership of land. Under the CARL, the biggest local landlords such as the Ayalas, Zobels, Cojuangcos and Enriles were even able to expand their landholdings. In 1985-95, the number of hectares covered by foreign corporations such as Dole, Del Monte and NDCGuthrie doubled from 75,000 to 166,000 hectares. The CARL did not lay hands on agricultural lands that were to be subjected to land use conversion.
The Cojuangco family used the CARL's provision on "stock-sharing" in 1987 to avoid partitioning Hacienda Luisita. In 1998, Eduardo 'Danding' Cojuangco also employed this scheme. To exempt his haciendas in Negros (totalling 4,361 hectares) from distribution, he consolidated and integrated these into a corporation he owns. Worthless "shares" of this corporation were distributed to farmworkers.
The "stock-sharing scheme" of the Cojuangcos has been made the official model for the "distribution" of commercial farms through the Department of Agrarian Reform's Administrative Order No. 9. As of now, there are about 50,000 hectares of agricultural land all over the country that may be potentially covered by this scheme.
Under the Ramos regime, the issue of land distribution was ultimately abandoned. Certificates of Land Transfer and Certificates of Land Ownership Award that had already been distributed were revoked extensively. Peasant families were evicted from their homes and wide expanses of agricultural lands were bulldozed by foreign speculators and investors in order to build tourism facilities, subdivisions and industrial enclaves.
Worse, laws such as the Land Lease Act (1996) and the Mining Act (1995) were implemented following the dictates of the IMF-World Bank-World Trade Organization. The Land Lease Act allows foreigners to "lease" land in the Philippines for 75 to 99 years. Similarly, the Mining Act allows 100% foreign-owned corporations to open concessions of up to 100,000 hectares and conduct mining operations for 25 to 50 years.
Erap's charade
Estrada's government shamelessly pretends to be 'propeasant'. Complementing his "pro-poor" stance are his babblings on "land productivity" and "food security".
The "land productivity" being pushed by the Estrada regime involves the further abandonment of land to foreign and local big business. The "food security" line, on the other hand, pertains not to the development of local production for selfsufficiency but the liberalized importation of agricultural products.
The establishment of the Agrarian Reform Communities (ARC) which started under the Ramos regime is one of the Estrada government's current priorities. It attempts to put a "pro-poor" stamp on commercial and export-oriented agriculture that primarily depends on foreign capital and technology.
ARCs designate Key Production Areas (KPA), or communities that specialize in the production of export crops such as pepper, asparagus and cutflowers. To further widen the scope of KPAs, arable lands allotted for palay and corn
production are being reduced from formerly five million hectares to only 1.9 million hectares. In 1997, 59,071.30 hectares under the auspices of the Department of Agrarian Reform were subjected to land conversion. This can only aggravate food scarcity and crisis in the countryside.
Land conversion results in the widespread dislocation of peasants in many parts of the country (refer to table). Under these conditions, the ruling class is further licensed to grab land from peasants, peg their wages at even lower rates and extract higher land rent and interest on loans. All this pushes the peasantry deeper into poverty.
So long as the chains of imperialist rule and feudal exploitation remain unbroken, the peasant masses shall continue to be shackled to a life of misery.
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