Correspondence Reports:
Prevalent forms of exploitation in the Southern Tagalog countryside

Basahin ang artikulong ito sa Pilipino

Only 845 landlords control 48% of agricultural land in all of Southern Tagalog. The following article is based on documents of the recently concluded Mass Work Conference in Southern Tagalog and discusses how land monopoly is maintained through a number of stark and growing forms of feudal and semifeudal exploitation in the region.

Ka Selmo�s tenure is uncertain. His master regards him only as a servant (katulong). Any time his landlord wishes, he may be evicted from the land. Ka Selmo is helpless because those are the terms of the agreement he entered into as the careataker of his master�s land.

Ka Selmo is but one of hundreds of thousands of farm workers who suffer severe exploitation under the �servant system� (sistemang katulong) that is now becoming prevalent in Occidental Mindoro.

Landlords in the province use the �servant system� to deceive peasants fighting for their right to the land they till. Instead of taking in tenants, they hire farm workers they call �servants�. Under these conditions, landlords deprive farm workers of any guarantee that they could continue working the land. They merely agree on their respective shares of the harvest. At present, servants usually get seven to eight cavans per harvest.

Landlords are able to get away with this kind of extreme exploitation because the number of farm workers competing with each other for work has burgeoned. Out of desperation, they are forced to swallow onerous agreements to ensure their families� subsistence.

The �servant system� is but one of the forms of feudal and semifeudal exploitation currently becoming widespread in the ricegrowing areas of the Southern Tagalog countryside. Such forms have emerged as a result of the efforts of landlords to exempt their lands from the hollow Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law.

Among the other types of exploitation are hunusan, porsyentuhan or kontratahan, pakyawan, takai, kabesilya and tampa.

Hunusan is a system of sharing where only 20- 25% of the entire harvest is given by the landowner to the farm workers. In Laguna, however, the prevalent arrangement involves paying farm workers cash equivalent to what they used to receive as palay.

Under the porsyentuhan or kontratahan system, the landowner lets the farm workers work his paddies from the preparation of the land to harvesting the crop. He pays the farm workers 10% of the earnings from the harvest.

In the pakyawan system, the landowner pays the farm workers a lumpsum for working the land from the planting to the harvest season. Landowners pay farm workers eight cavans or P1,500 per hectare.

The takai system is another practice now prevalent in Occidental Mindoro. Takai refers to a 25- square meter plot of land contracted out by the landowner to a farm worker for the amount of P100- P150. Exploitation in this kind of system is particularly intense because it usually takes a farm worker two days to finish one takai. Thus, his daily wage amounts to a mere P50-P75.

Farm workers also suffer intense exploitation from the kabesilya system. A kabesilya is a person in charge of a group of farm workers. Landowners approach him when they want to contract farm workers to work on their land. As head of the group, the kabesilya merely gives orders to the workers and has no part in production. Aside from the wage he receives from the landowner, the kabesilya also earns by shaving P2-P5 from the daily wage of each farm worker.

The tampa system is an adjunct of the kabesilya system. During times when a farm worker is unemployed, he approaches the kabesilya to borrow rice. Farm workers give one day�s work for every salop (three liters dry measure) of rice (worth P45) borrowed. On payday, it is the kabesilya who draws the farm workers� share of the harvest. Thus, the farm worker earns a daily wage of only P45.

These new ways of intensifying exploitation have further worsened the wretched condition of farm workers like Ka Selmo. As they continue to be mired in poverty, they have nowhere else to go but to take action and forge ranks to advance genuine land reform through the people�s democratic revolution.

21 November 2003
English Edition

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