Amado Guerrero
July 30, 1970

3. Sham Land Reform

In the period of direct and indirect U.S. imperialist rule, there has been a long list of sham land reform measures. These include laws involving land titles, disposition of public lands, resettlement, "expropriation" of large estates, "fair" crop distribution credit and "anti-usury" and "just wage" for farm workers. These laws have been adopted only at certain times when the reactionaries fear most the avalanche of peasant armed struggle and they wish to deceive the rural masses. The reactionary measures taken on the land problem from the time of the Taft Commission to that of the present puppet regime have always been expressed in high-sounding and "benevolent" terms but they have only resulted in more vicious dispossession and exploitation of the rural masses. To relate the story of reactionary land reform in the country is to relate a story of chicanery and deception in which the narne of the peasantry is invoked to aggrandize the landlord class.

a. Resettlement and Landgrabbing. The earliest law pertaining to land that the U.S. imperialists adoped in the Philippines was the Land Registration Act of 1905 which took the pretext of facilitating the issuance of land titles. The act recognized only three titles to properties that could be registered under it; i.e., the Informacion Possesseria, registration under the Spanish Mortgage Law and imperfect title or possession since 1894. The handful of top renegades of the Philippine Revolution, Yankee land speculators, landlords and bureaucrats from the municipal level and up rushed to register untitled lands as their property, including those belonging to the peasants and national minorities who were kept ignorant of the procedure for land registration during the Spanish colonial regime as well as during U.S. colonial rule.

To the U.S. imperialists the main purpose of the act was to determine the limits of private lands and to classify those beyond them as public lands under their arbitrary disposition and control. The Cadastral Act of 1907 was passed to carry out further the U.S. imperialist seizure of land and not to rectify previous errors in land titles. Until now, cadastral surveys are being used as a major device for landgrabbing.

A series of public land laws was passed in 1903, 1919 and 1929 under the pretext of encouraging the dispossessed peasantry to acquire public lands through homestead, purchase or lease of limited areas. The call for resettlement in so-called frontier areas was actually the fig-leaf for the large-scale acquisition of public lands by U.S. citizens, U.S. agricultural corporations and Filipino landlords and bureaucrats. The dispossessed peasants were attracted to these areas so as to provide labor power for clearing the land and to serve as the buffer between the dispossessed local inhabitants who usually belonged to non-Christian nationalities on one hand and the U.S. imperialists and landlords on the other.

In an attempt to counteract the peasant movement in Central Luzon and other parts of the country, the landlord Quezon had the National Land Resettlernent Administration organized in 1939 in order to operate two settlement projects in Southwestern Mindanao and one in Cagayan Valley that were designed as exile areas for rebellious peasants.

At the height of the peasant war of 1950, the Land Settlement Development Corporation (Lasedeco) was organized to resettle landless peasants. In its three years of existence, the Lasedeco resettled no more than 400 peasant families. Subsequently, the reactionary military under the C.I.A. agent and big landlord Ramon Magsaysay put up resettlement projects under the Economic Development Corps (Edcor). No more than 1,000 peasant families were resettled. The last resettlement projects were conducted under the National Resettlement and Rehabilitation Administration (NARRA) established in 1954. All these resettlement projects did not improve the status of even one-tenth of one per cent of the landless peasantry in the country. The settlers were merely thrown into forest areas only to suffer government neglect and be susceptible to the old evils of feudalism. The main purpose of the reactionaries was merely to have a token of "land reform" to serve their mendacious propaganda. U.S. military advisers and the reactionary armed forces utilized the resettlement projects only as a counterinsurgency measure.

Following their own calls for resettlement during the last seven decades, the landlords together with the compradors and the bureaucrat capitalists have extended feudalism and capitalist farming to the mountains and hills. They use their surplus in agricultural production and comprador profits to acquire more lands or use their lands to get big loans to acquire more lands. They get titles to vast areas of public lands, trap settlers into clearing and cultivating them and then eject these settlers or retain them as tenants. To comply with Article XIII, Section 2 of the Philippine Constitution, they lease vast areas of cultivable land from the public domain each as large as two thousand hectares and misrepresent these as grazing lands or ranches. Subsequently, they acquire these lands as their own private agricultural lands. They grab even the mountains, hills and rivers. They also become logging concessionaires and subsequently acquire the land from which the timber has been cut. They do not only widen their area for capitalist and feudal exploitation but they also cause floods and soil erosion to the detriment of the toiling masses in low-lying areas.

The U.S. monopolies have participated in the seizure of land from the people by establishing their own plantations like those of Del Monte, Dole, Stanfilco, Firestone Rubber and several others and by opening mines like those of Benguet Consolidated, Lepanto, Atlas Consolidated and so many others. These mines involve the direct seizure of land from the peasants and national minorities and also the destruction of wide expanses of agricultural fields as a result of the flow of mineral and chemical wastes in rivers. More mines are now feverishly being opened all over the country by both the U.S. and Japanese imperialists.

As land-extensive enterprises like mines, plantations and ranches are being set up more rapidly than before by both the U.S. imperialists and their local lackeys, the broad masses of the people are bound to wage a fierce resistance to the end. The dispossessed peasantry and the national minorities who are now being pushed out from resettlement and reservation areas have started to fight vigorously against U.S. imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.

b. Land Retention Limits and Bogus Expropriation. In all laws of expropriation that they have passed, the reactionaries invariably require "due process" (i.e., bureaucratic run-around and expensive litigation that the poor peasants cannot afford) and "just compensation" (i.e., high prices for barren lands that landlords are willing to part with). Only for token purposes have some lands been actually bought by the reactionary govermnent from the landlords. The higher the price of the land paid to the landlord, the higher is the redistribution price for the peasants. Thus, only landlords and big bureaucrats have been able to acquire expropriated lands or these remain under state administration indefinitely.

The reactionary government helps the landlord class engage in land speculation. With so much given to them in payment, if they are wilIing to sell their lands, the landlords can always buy lands elsewhere or get public lands in exchange. After a short while, the reactionary government fails to appropriate funds for its "reform" program.

In an attempt to hoodwink the broad masses of the people enraged by the persistence of large friar estates, a major issue in the Philippine Revolution of 1896, the Taft Commission purchased from the religious corporations some of these estates. The exorbitant amount of over $7.0 million were paid for some 400,000 acres. Small plots were subsequently resold to 60,000 tenants and bigger portions were allocated to leading renegades of the Philippine Revolution as their bribe for collaborating with U.S. imperialism. Within a short period of time, the recipients of these small plots sold out as they were weighed down by the heavy redistribution price and got deeper and deeper in debt.

Quezon used the slogan of "social justice" as his mouthwash at a time when the peasant masses manifested strongly their aspiration to be liberated from imperialist and feudal rule during the thirties. But, he agreed with the landlord delegates in the 1935 Constitutional Convention in putting into the colonial constitution the requirement of "just compensation" for lands that may be expropriated from the landlords and also in implying that feudal exploitation had a right to exist so long as the reactionary government could not buy out the landlords. It never came to pass under the auspices of Quezon that, as indicated in the constitution, a limit to retention of private agricultural lands would be set by law and be enforced.

The colonial constitution directly sets limits for the holding of public agricultural lands. A private corporation or association is not allowed to acquire, lease, or hold public agricultural lands in excess of 1,024 hectares. No individual is allowed to acquire such lands by purchase in excess of 144 hectares, or by lease in excess of 1,024 hectares, or by homestead in excess of 24 hectares. A maximum of 2,000 hectares of grazing lands may, however, be leased to an individual, private corporation, or association. These retention limits are high enough to allow the landlords to expand their landholdings tremendously. But these retention limits have never been strictly required by the reactionary government. Public lands in general have always been an open field for the expansion of the landholdings of Filipino comprador-landlords and big bureaucrats as well as U.S. agrocorporations.

Commonwealth Act No. 21 was passed in 1936 authorizing Quezon to purchase homesites on large landed estates for resale to occupants and it called for the appropriation of the measly amount of P1.0 million. It was, however, only in 1939 that he created the Rural Progress Administration to acquire and administer properties under the foregoing legislation. When this administrative body was dissolved in 1950, it had acquired a total of only 37,746 hectares equal to a mere particle of one per cent of the total land area owned by the landlords in 1948.

The Land Reform Act of 1955 was another piece of deception brought out by the landlord-C.I.A. agent Ramon Magsaysay who misrepresented himself as a "land reformer" in his attempt to seize political initiative from the armed peasant struggle. The act created the Land Tenure Administration with the avowed purpose of expropriating landed estates whose size exceeded the maximum retention limit of 300 and 600 hectares of contiguous area for private individuals and corporations, respectively; and to make it a formal state policy for the Philippines to remain an agricultural appendage of the United States. Under the puppet regimes of Magsaysay, Garcia and partially of Macapagal, no more than 30 landed estates (including urban real estates) were expropriated. The expropriation of the few estates became an occasion for the corrupt collusion between the government negotiator and the landlord who overpriced his estate.

The Agricultural Land Reform Code passed in 1963 under the Macapagal regime is the latest of sham land reform measures.23 It is touted by the reactionaries as the legal instrument that would finally emancipate the tenant masses in rice and corn lands. But like all previous sham land reform laws, it declares that the reactionary government shall expropriate lands from the landlords only by giving "just compensation" and that the tenant masses shall have to pay the redistribution price of the parcels allotted to them from the expropriated lands. No poor peasant, farm worker or lower-middle peasant can afford to pay the redistribution price even on a deferred-payment basis. The redistribution price is exorbitant because it embodies the overpricing that usually goes into land purchases made by the reactionary government. Furthermore, there are administration costs, interest payments and taxes charged on the tenant who tries to pay the redistribution price.

The Agricultural Land Reform Code sets an order of priority in expropriating lands, which is as follows: 1) idle or abandoned lands; 2) those whose area exceeds 1,024 hectares; 3) those whose area exceeds 500 hectares but is not more than 1,024 hectares; 4) those whose area exceeds 144 hectares but is not more than 500 hectares; and 5) those whose area exceeds 75 hectares but is not more than 144 hectares. Giving priority to the expropriation of idle or abandoned lands is downright silly, because these lands can easily be confiscated or reverted to the public domain. Idle and abandoned lands are usually of poor quality and difficult to cultivate. The landlords themselves consider these lands uneconomic and are just too willing to part with them at an overprice they can always collude on with the reactionary government. Buying this type of land would tie down and deplete the finances of the Land Bank; and the tenant masses would not be able to afford the redistribution price and the cost of developing the land.

It will never come to the point that the reactionary govermnent will be able to enforce a maximum retention limit of 75 hectares which the Agricultural Land Reform Code merely suggests by its order of priority in expropriation. Even if this limit is enforced it would still be high enough to give free rein to the landlord class. A landlord can simply distribute the excess areas to immediate members of his family or sell them in order to acquire lands elsewhere. As a matter of fact, the code encourages the landlord class to sell out where there is peasant unrest and get public lands elsewhere or buy lands elsewhere.

The landlord does not have to move out from any area. The code allows him so many brusque tricks to evade expropriation, aside from the simple act of distributing excess land areas to immediate relatives. He may coerce or deceive his tenants into signing or attesting to a declaration that he himself is the tiller. He can adopt some semblance of mechanization or actually adopt mechanization. He can adopt the wage system instead of the tenancy system. He can shift from the production of rice or corn to the production of some other crops. He can cheat his tenants on accounts and pile up debts on them so that they will be prevented from becoming "amortizing-owners." He can simply pass off his land as an educational, residential or commercial area. The code categorically exempts from expropriation lands that are already or about to be operated on a mechanized basis, or that are planted to crops outside of rice and corn. Thus, lands planted to sugar cane, coconut, citrus and others are exempted. Lands categorized as religious, educational, residential or industrial sites are also exempted.

The most important factor in the persistence of landlordism in this country is the political power behind the sham and token operation of the seven "land reform" agencies created by the code. It is impossible for the reactionary government to go against its feudal masters. The National Land Reform Council and the Land Authority, the principal policy-making agencies, are under the thumb of the landlord class. Their landlord officials have as a matter of fact grabbed more public lands for themselves than they have been able to distribute to the landless.

There was not a single landed estate purchased by the Macapagal puppet regime from the landlord class for redistribution under the Agricultural Land Reform Code. It took three years from the enactment of the code before the Land Bank, responsible for financing the expropriation of landed estates, could be organized. During the period of 1966-69. the Land Bank actually received the measly amount of P13.6 million out of the P400 million that was supposed to have been appropriated to it. During the same period, the reactionary government released several hundred times more funds (half a billion pesos annually) for the reactionary armed forces to keep the people in feudal bondage. A year of Philcag adventure in Vietnam was worth P35 million.

Under the code, the capital of the Land Bank is supposed to be P1.5 billion, with P900 million subscribed by the government and issued as preferred shares. Now that the reactionarv government is more bankrupt than ever, it will find it more difficult to release funds for its bogus program of expropriation.

From 1966 to 1969, the Land Bank was able to purchase 10 agricultural estates comprising 997.6 hectares for P3.4 million. The lands were to be resold to 363 tenants. It is clear by this record that the reactionary government will never be able to buy off even one percent of landlord property.

And yet in the few areas where actual token purchases of landlord property were made by the reactionary government, the poor peasants as in previous times would never be able to afford the redistribution price. The average cost per hectare of land acquired so far by the Land Bank is P3,408. If the lands were to be redistributed to the tenant peasants, each would actually be entitled to three hectares. Computations can immediately show that the tenant will never be able to save enough to pay the principal of P10,224 and the administration costs, interest charges and taxes, even on an installment plan of 25 years. We know too well that a poor peasant cannot save P409 annually just to pay 1/25 of the principal cost of the land allotted to him.24

In the six years following the enactment of the Agricultural Land Reform Code, the U.S. imperialists were able to take over public agricultural lands at the expense of homesteaders. Even before a single agricultural estate could be expropriated, the reactionary government turned over to such U.S. agrocorporations as the Philippine Packing Corporation, United Fruit, Dole and Standard (Philippines) Fruit Corporation tens of thousands of hectares with the option to widen them some more for planting pineapple, banana and others. Such government corporations as the National Development Corporation and the Mindanao Development Authority made up "growers' agreements" with these U.S. agrocorporations, despite the constitutional rule that only Philippine corporations with at least 60 per cent Filipino equity can hold public agricultural lands and that even these cannot hold any such land in excess of 1,024 hectares. Fifty thousand hectares of the Mt. Apo National Park Reservation was also offered to these U.S. agrocorporations, especially the notorious United Fruit Corporation.

The landlord class has never stopped to grab lands that are already being cultivated by the national minorities and small settlers. As a matter of fact, the reactionary government encourages the landlords to exchange their lands in more populated areas for wider fields from the public domain, especially in Mindanao. But the most striking development in the land situation since the enactment of the Agricultural Land Reform Code has been the rapid conversion of rice and corn lands into sugar lands and the considerable increase of large-scale capitalist farming and farm-mechanization. Peasants have been driven out of their farms by bulldozers, guns and court orders.

As a result of the decontrol policy and the repeated devaluation of the peso, the comprador-landlords have been in a position to acquire more lands and build up their milling facilities. The sugar landlords have been specially favored by the puppet government with the biggest financial support to expand their sugar cane fields. The puppet government has extended all the necessary dollar support for the construction of eighteen new sugar mills at various points of the country. The construction of forty more, sugar mills is being considered. This is in line with the U.S. imperialist policy of preempting the formal termination of the Laurel-Langley Agreement by exhausting the financial resources of the puppet government on projects that will reinforce the colonial character of the economy.

__________________________

23 In 1971, the Marcos puppet regime amended the Agricultural Land Reform Code and relabelled it as the Code of Agrarian Reforms. The amendatory act, Rep. Act No. 6389, conclusively defines “just compensation” for landlords as the payment of the “fair market value” of lands in cases expropriation and in a roundabout way requires the tenant-peasant to join a “cooperative” before he can petition for the purchase of the land he is tilling from the landlord. Rep. Act No. 6390, creating an “agrarian reform special account,” puts emphasis on the setting up of “cooperatives” that are underlings of the landlords’ rural banks and the Agricultural Credit Administration.

24 From 1965 to 1971, the entire period during which the Agricultural Land Reform Code was in effect before being relabelled as the Code of Agrarian Reforms, the various “land reform” agencies actually received a total of P399.24 million out of a total appropriation of P1.3 billion. Only the measly amount of P36.32 million was released specifically to the Land Bank, which in turn spent P16,002,900 to purchase 32 landed estates having the total size of 3,876 hectares and involving 2,268 tenants. The magnitude of the land expropriated is not even a drop in the vast ocean of landlord holdings. Yet no poor tenant can afford to pay even by installment to the end of redistribution price of a single hectare. The average purchase price paid by the reactionary government so far is P4,149 per hectare. On top of this, the reactionary government demands payment for administration costs and interest charges.

__________________________