Amado Guerrero
July 30, 1970

4. The Extent of Feudal and Semifeudal Exploitation

a. The Magnitude of the Land Problem 25

The peasantry has become more impoverished during the last seven decades of both direct and indirect U.S. imperialist rule in the Philippines. The reactionary government admits that the rate of tenancy increased from 18 per cent in 1903 to 22 per cent in 1918, to 35 per cent in 1933, to 37.4 per cent in 1948 and then to 48 per cent in 1956 and to 50 per cent in 1961. According to the 1960 agricultural census, 63 per cent of rice cultivators are share-croppers, tilling an average of 2.6 hectares each. In 1963, eight million of the 27 million Filipino people were sharecroppers. All these figures coming from the statistical agencies of the reactionary government require verification through actual rural surveys. But they indicate the extreme plight of the great majority of the Filipino peasantry.

In 1903, only 0.8 per cent of the population owned 35 per cent of the total farm area. Fifty years after, a lesser percentage of people owned more lands. In 1953, only 0.36 per cent owned 41.5 per cent of the total farm area.

As of 1954, there were about 13,859 landlords (their names are often repeated in the list) owning 50 hectares to more than 1,000 hectares of agricultural lands. Landlords owning 50 to 200 hectares numbered 11,770; 201 to 500 hectares, 1,455; 501 to 1,000 hectares, 423; and above 1,000 hectares, 221. This handful of exploiters owned 2.4 million hectares of the 5.7 million hectares total farm area. The 221 biggest land owners owned more than half-a-million hectares or close to 10 per cent of the total farm area in the country.

As of 1968, there were about 10,764 landlords (their names are again often repeated in the list) listed by provincial assessors as owning from 50 hectares to more than 1,000 hectares of agricultural lands. Landlords owning 50 to 199 hectares numbered 8,914; 200 to 499 hectares, 1,228; 500 to 1,000 hectares, 417; and above 1,000 hectares 204. The total area of their landholdings could easily come to 3,000,000 hectares or a little below 50 per cent of the total agricultural area of the country today.

The number of big landlords owning 50 hectares to more than 1,000 hectares in Northern Luzon is 717; Central Luzon, 1,899; Southern Luzon, 2,827; Visayas, 3,150 and Mindanao, 2,171. These figures are still based on the listing made by provincial assessors of the reactionary government. Rural investigation in various parts of the country have revealed that there were omissions in the listing. At any rate, the listing amply shows the magnitude of big landlord property in the country.

The 25 provinces with the biggest number of big landlords are the following in their order:

1. Iloilo
2. Negros Occidental
3. Quezon
4. Camarines Sur
5. Nueva Ecija
6. Cagayan
7. Capiz
8. Negros Oriental
9. Masbate
10. Pampanga
11. Zamaboanga del Norte
12. Tarlac
13. North Cotabato
14. Bulacan
15. Mindoro Oriental
16. Bataan
17. Bukidnon
18. Zambales
19. Albay
20. Romblon
21. Batangas
22. Agusan
23. Davao del Norte
24. Aklan
25. Pangasinan

Every Philippine province is afflicted with feudalism and has its own share of landlords and, therefore, poor peasants and farm workers. Batanes, Camiguin and Surigao del Norte, tbe smallest provinces in terms of population and territory have 11, 12 and 11 big landlords owning 50 hectares and above, respectively. The mountainous provinces of Kalinga-Apayao, Mountain Province, Ifugao and Eastern Samar have 11, 15, 8 and 7 big landlords, respectively. Romblon and Sulu are provinces with a small land area but which have 161 and 118 big landlords, respectively.

On a national scale, we may readily classify the owners of 50 hectares and above as big landlords. On the basis of closer knowledge of the land problem, that is to say, the concrete relations on landholdings, we can determine who are the big, middle and small landlords in areas where landlord property is generally less than 50 hectares. There is a significant number of landlords owning 10 to 49 hectares. The magnitude of landlord property is not the sole factor that makes feudalism. More important are the relations of production to be considered. This should be well remembered in analyzing the land situation in provinces where population density is high and there is relative land scarcity. Here the value of land is so high that the poor peasants and other semiproletarians have absolutely no hope of attaining the status of owner-cultivators.

Feudal and semifeudal exploitation in such land-scarce areas as Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, La Union, the mountain provinces, Cebu and Eastern Samar is even worse than, say, in certain areas of Central Luzon where the armed peasant movement has to a certain degree seized democratic gains. The land-scarce areas are generally the source of farm workers for haciendas in other areas and of settlers in the frontier areas of the last seven decades. Farm workers in the haciendas of Central Luzon and even Laguna come in great numbers from the Ilocos provinces and in the haciendas of the Negros and Mindanao provinces, from Cebu and provinces of Panay, Samar and Leyte. In Mindanao, the land-starved Visayans and Ilocanos are also found in great numbers as homesteaders and tenants.

b. Basic Forms of Exploitation in the Countryside

The basic forms of landlord exploitation in the countryside today include the exaction of high land rent from the poor peasants and semi-owner peasants and the imposition of the extremest wage slavery on farm workers. Aggravating these basic forms of exploitation are the practice of usury, price manipulation, menial service and tribute-making. Political oppression is also necessarily the concomitant of economic exploitation. Only a concrete social investigation by the proletarian revolutionary cadres can fully expose the evils of feudalism and semifeudalism from place to place. However, we can cite some widespread practices as the starting point for understanding the problem.

1) Land Rent, Usury and Other Feudal Evils. Land rent to the landlord is still as high as 80, 70, 60 and 50 per cent of the crop, although it is commonly said by the less knowledgeable that the "50-50" sharecropping arrangement is the prevalent system of rent payment all over the country. In many areas, 60 per cent rent is still the open rule dictated by the landlord who takes advantage of the already impoverished condition of the-poor peasant and of the absence of any other economic opportunity for the latter.

Ordinarily, the landlord boasts of having a "50-50" sharecropping arrangement with his tenants. But in fact he makes them shoulder all the agricultural expenses. It is very common that mainly or only the tenants shoulder the expenses incurred in preparing the seedlings, plowing and harrowing, planting, irrigation, fertilization, pest control, harvesting and threshing. Even if the landlord were to share in such expenses "50-50," it would still be unfair and unjust to lose sight of the actual work expended by the tenants and to give the landlord a 50 per cent rent on the crop. Besides, whenever he provides seedlings, fertilizers, pesticides and other such materials, he overprices and charges payment for these and thereby sucks blood from the tenants at this very instance. He also demands a high price for the use of his work animals or simply makes his tenants absorb the expenses for renting the rich peasants' work animals. Whenever he introduces some machinery to take over a part in the process of cultivation, he always manages to increase his share and reduces his tenants' share. He can unilaterally decide to "improve" the land, say the irrigation or dike system, and then require the tenants to pay back to him in the form of higher land rent the expenses which he alone had accounted. The tenants are obliged to deliver to the landlord his crop share and to stock this up in his granary without any compensation and often times even without being given a meal by him.

On sugar lands that have been converted from rice and corn lands, the tenants face such possibilities as complete displacement, conversion into farm workers or accepting a special kind of sharecropping arrangement. The sharecropping arrangement is supposed to be "50-50" between the landlord and the tenant on the net amount after the sugar central has deducted 40 to 50 per cent of the milled sugar and after the landlord has also deducted for himself his supposed expenses for seedlings, harrowing, fertilizer, weeding, cutting and delivery to the sugar central. The landlord alone does all the computations for the agricultural expenses and he alone knows the quantity and the value of the sugar and molasses that come off the milling process. Oftentimes, the landlord mendaciously tells the tenant that both of them have had bad luck while in fact the landlord has made a killing.

Usury is a major feudal device that many landlords use to increase their crop share and also to acquire more lands. They may agree to any sharecropping arrangement but in lending money to the tenants either for the cultivation of the land or for the upkeep of the tenant's family, an interest rate ranging from 100 per cent in three months to 50 per cent per month is demanded. The landlords take the option of demanding cash or so much of the tenant's crop share, whichever yields the higher profit at the time of the debt payment. Together with the landlords, merchants and a number of rich peasants impose usury on the poor peasants long before the next harvest. Usury results mainly from the fact that poor peasants can hardly subsist on their crop share and can offer no collateral except their crop share in the next harvest.

Crop distribution laws involving tenants only in rice and sugar lands and credit laws have been passed by the reactionary government. But these have been of no avail to the peasantry. In practice, the landlord class holds the tenants in its vice with feudal common law. Contracts between the landlords and the tenants are not even in written-form and the terms can be arbitrarily fixed or changed by the former. The tenants are under the constant threat of being ejected or shifted to inferior and smaller plots. They cannot afford to get involved in a long-drawn litigation in which they are sure to lose inside and outside the courts. The landlord's hatchetmen and the reactionary troops and police are always on hand to oust them from their tenancy in the most brutal manner possible.

It is not surprising if in many cases the tenants are made to pay wholly or partially for the share of the overseer. Oftentimes, the overseer calls them to do construction work or menial service for the landlord or for himself or for the local reactionary government without pay. Overseers and hacienda guards play the oppressive role of running dogs.

The Rice Share Tenancy Act of 1933 declared as contrary to "public policy" tenancy arrangements in which the tenant received less than 50 per cent of the net crop. At the same time it provided that the law could take effect within a province only if the majority of the landlord-controlled municipal councils in the province would file a petition for implementation against their very class interests. Because of the obvious loopholes in the law, the landlord Quezon pretended to play hero by having the law amended in 1936 to empower himself to proclaim the effectivity of the law piecemeal. The result was that he made flamboyant proclamations only in ten provinces where he considered it necessary to mislead the peasants. Long after Quezon, the landlord class would still continue to exploit the peasant masses at the same rate as before.

Commonwealth Act 4113 of 1933 requires the landlords in sugar lands to show receipts from the sugar central on the amount of sugar cane harvested and on the quantity and value of sugar and molasses that come off the milling process. This has never been observed. Besides, the landlords who are often stockholders in the milling corporation can easily collude with the sugar central in cheating the tenants. The widest area for deception is allowed by this act which gives the landlord the privilege of determining the expenses incurred for planting, cultivating and harvesting.

In an attempt to deceive the peasants into accepting their feudal servitude, especially in areas where the people's army was strong, the landlord Roxas resorted to proclaiming the effectivity of the Rice Share Tenancy Act of 1933 all over the country in 1946. He even had another law passed, Republic Act No. 31, which he allowed to be inaccurately called the "70-30" law in order to give the false impression that the tenants would get the bigger share. This law provided that 55 per cent of the crop would go to the tenant only if he furnished the work animals and implements and landlord and tenant shared all other expenses equally. Seventy per cent would go to the tenant only if he defrayed all the expenses for planting and cultivation of the land. The high land rent of more than 50 per cent still stares us in the face.

Resorting to redundancy, the landlord Magsaysay had the Agrarian Relations Act of 1954 passed. The law merely fixed the land rent at 30 per cent of the net crop after deducting the costs of fertilizer, pest and weed control, reaping and threshing. He who provides the work animals is entitled to five per cent; farm implements, five per cent; transplanting, 25 per cent; and final harrowing, five per cent of the net crop. This "70-30" law has been followed only in a few places. Here, the landlords manage to actually raise the land rent by overpricing their share of agricultural costs and engaging in usury and other unscrupulous activities.

The latest law involving tenancy, the Agricultural Land Reform Code, provides that share tenancy shall be "abolished" by bringing the tenant masses into the "leasehold" system in "land reform" districts proclaimed piecemeal by the National Land Reform Council. Under the "leasehold" system, the tenants enter into a "leasehold" contract with their landlord to pay in cash or crop a fixed annual land rent equivalent to 25 per cent of the annual net crop computed on the basis of the three normal crop years preceding the contract. While it appears that rent reduction has been effected by the code, the truth is that there is nothing of the sort because in the "leasehold" contract the tenants commit themselves to shouldering all agricultural expenses and, worse, to paying the fixed annual rent even when the crop is bad or some calamity, like flood, drought or infestation, destroys the entire crop. It is for this reason that the peasant masses detest the Agricultural Land Reform Code like the plague. The "leasehold" system is nothing but a new form of share tenancy and is in many respects worse than the older forms of tenancy.

Several years have passed since the enactment of the Agricultural Land Reform Code and yet the sharecropping arrangement substantially remains the same in the various parts of the country. The Land Authority has reported that from 1966 to 1969 only 13,377 tenants out of millions went into "leasehold." The National Land Reform Council itself has been extremely slow in proclaiming "land reform districts" because the reactionary government as a whole has priorities over and above its sham land reform program. The proclamation of "land reform districts" entails bigger financing for the various "land reform" agencies. Even in areas where these agencies have been well-financed, there is no letup in the feudal and semifeudal oppression and exploitation of the peasant masses.

A long time ago, an anti-usury law was passed limiting the maximum annual interest rate to 12 per cent for secured loans and 14 per cent for unsecured loans. Credit institutions like the Agricultural Credit and Cooperative Financing Administration (ACCFA) and private rural banks were also established. But these credit institutions have become mere sources of capital that merchants, landlords and bureaucrats use in their commercial and land-buying operations. Victimized by usury and manipulation of the prices of commodities, owner-peasants become bankrupt and lose their lands. The rural banks often serve as instruments for rendering many owner-cultivators bankrupt. Their lands are underassessed when used as collateral. Because they can offer no collateral aside from their future crop share the poor peasants easily fall prey to the most vicious usurers.

The Agricultural Credit Administration (ACA) has taken over the functions of the ACCFA under the Agricultural Land Reform Code. There is no fundamental change; there is only a change of name. Like its predecessor, the ACA is still basically a source of capital for merchant and usury activities and for fake cooperatives controlled by the landlords, bureaucrats and rich peasants. The limited capital of the ACA basically serves the landlord class. Even assuming that this capital is actually used to serve poor peasants, it is so limited that it cannot serve even only one per cent of the vast number of poor peasants. The ACA is nothing but a fig-leaf for the entire exploitative banking system, both government and private, which is controlled and manipulated by the landlord class for maintaining its class rule in the countryside.

2) Wage Slavery on Farms. Because farm workers generally come from land-scarce and one-crop areas, they are even more exploited than the poor peasants who can still subsist on the land that they tenant. Farm workers are a great part of the relative surplus of manpower in the countryside. The hacenderos and labor contractors recognize their desperate economic condition. On this basis both the hacenderos and the labor contractors engage them in the worst exploitative relations despite the fact that agricultural production for export is extremely profitable for the hacenderos.

In sugar cane haciendas, the landlord distinguishes regular from seasonal farm workers. This is his way of getting himself responsible only for the year-round employment of a relatively small number of regular farm workers. In classifying a bigger number of farm workers as seasonal or temporary workers, he can give to them the heaviest work load and pay them the lowest wages only during the few months of the cutting season. Some of these "temporary" farm workers actually reside in the vicinity of the hacienda even off-season while others come only during the cutting season. In different areas, they get average daily wages ranging from Pl.00 to P3.00. They live in subhuman quarters and buy or take on credit at high interest rates their necessities from the hacienda stores at marked-up prices.

Even at the time that U .S. demand for Philippine sugar rose and the price of this commodity rose several times over as a result of the Cuban Revolution, the farm workers were not accorded corresponding wage increases and were pressed down to their old starvation wages. Yet an ongoing inflation and the 1962 devaluation cut down their old wages.

The Agricultural Land Reform Code assured the farm workers of the minimum daily wage of P3.50 in 1963. This has not been complied with by the hacenderos. And yet the value of the peso has been rapidly eroded since then. After the latest devaluation of the currency, Congress made another formal increase of the minimum farm wage to P4.75. This increase of 35 per cent is not adequate to meet the more than 60 per cent devaluation of the currency. This devaluation continues unabated. And yet it is certain that the hacenderos as before will not comply with their own law unless the farm workers wage fierce and bitter political and economic struggle.

The "bill of rights" listed in one whole chapter of the Agricultural Land Reform Code assures the farm workers of the right to self-organization, to go on strike, to work for not more than eight hours daily unless they agree and unless they are given overtime pay at the regular rate plus 25 per cent, to claim damages for death or injuries sustained while at work, to claim compensation for personal injuries, death or illness, and to enjoy permanent tenure. All of these have been violated with utter brutality by the hacenderos.

Without unity and revolutionary consciousness, the farm workers are easily rendered helpless by the landlords because the latter can withhold the former's wages for the first month and the labor contractor is usually a person in authority (mayor, chief of police, councilor or barrio captain) in the place where the farm workers are recruited. Furthermore, the labor contractor binds the farm workers to himself by lending money to their families and by arbitrarily accounting expenses for transportation, food and other miscellaneous things as debt to him at usurious rates as high as 300 per cent while the farm workers are still in transit to the haciendas.

The labor contractor basically participates in landlord exploitation by getting a commission for every ton or day that the farm workers complete. While already in the hacienda, the farm workers are often forced to live in unsanitary quarters and are cheated of their food rations and in the weighing or counting of the sugar cane that they cut, haul or load. When they get sick, their fate is worse than a carabao's. They are merely sent away. A carabao is at least taken care of.

The condition of farm workers toiling in various areas where sugar cane, coconut, abaca, tobacco, rubber, banana, pineapple and vegetables are produced on a large scale and on the basis of capitalist farming should be closely investigated by the cadres inasmuch as the forms of exploitative relations differ from area to area. Ordinarily, however, the farm workers receive only a few tens of pesos monthly during the harvest season whether they are paid on wage or piecework (pakyaw) basis.

Because farm workers employed by rich peasants are also a significant lot, close attention has also to be paid to them. Their wage condition can still be improved even as their employers need to be neutralized instead of attacked as the enemy.

The preservation of feudalism in the Philippines is a matter of prime necessity for U.S. imperialism. If landlord power were to be overthrown in the countryside, U.S. imperialism would have nothing to stand on and it would have to face a colossal force that can drive it out of the country. So, U.S. imperialism resorts to all kinds of measures preventing an agrarian revolution. It has a program of counterinsurgency to suppress the revolutionary mass movement of the peasantry in the countryside. Components of this program of counterinsurgency are the sham land reform measures, "civic action," reformist organizations and murder gangs like the "Monkees," the Barrio Self-Defense Units (BSDU), the "provincial strike forces" and "special forces." U.S. imperialism keeps on adopting old tactics of counterrevolution and calling them by new names. It will certainly bring out its own aggressor troops from its military bases to attack the people the moment the reactionary puppet troops and police become weakened or fail to suppress the people.

U.S. imperialism has recently increased its direct interests in Philippine agriculture. U.S. agrocorporations have opened large plantations, especially in Mindanao. The Rockefeller monopoly group has put up the biggest fertilizer plant, the Esso Standard Fertilizer and Agricultural Chemical Co., Inc. (ESFAC),26 and has put up the International Rice Research Institute to undertake the culture of new rice varieties which require heavy doses of fertilizers. The ESFAC today can directly determine the price of all agricultural commodities by its control of fertilizers, pesticides and all chemicals for agricultural use. The Agricultural Land Reform Code was pushed through by U.S. imperialism as a maneuver to compel landlords to buy more farm equipment from U.S. companies and also to convert their rice and corn lands into sugar land inasmuch as mechanization and sugar cultivation are major excuses for them to get exempted from expropriation. Dow Chemicals, the notorious manufacturer of defoliants and other chemical-biological weapons (CBW) for the U.S. war of aggression in Indochina, is already in business in the Philippines and is frenziedly conducting research to destroy vegetation in the Philippines in the event that revolutionary base areas emerge.

The Japanese monopolies are collaborating with the U.S. monopolies in turning the Philippines into a market for farm equipment and in investing in plantations. U.S. imperialism today is accommodating the needs of Japan for Philippine agricultural commodities. To make sure that Japan will play second fiddle to it in Philippine agriculture, U.S. imperialism has accelerated its own direct investments in this field. The Japanese monopolies have long prepared to operate plantations once more in the Philippines as before in World War II.

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25 There is no substitute for actual barrio-to-barrio investigation though the figures stated under this section are based on the most considerable records available from the reactionary government. The author has discovered glaring discrepancies between these records and the reality in a number of provinces. Reality reveals a bigger problem of land concentration in the hands of a few.

26 The controlling stocks of ESFAC, now called Planters Products, have been taken over by Marcos and his clique.

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