The nation marks every October as Farmers’ Month. This year, the Marcos regime is working double time to boost its image after more than three years of failed and burdensome agricultural programs. Farmers consider him the number one pest, worse than the disasters that ravaged their farms and damaged their livelihoods.

After September’s successive ravaging typhoons, the government placed agricultural losses at a conservative ₱2.3 billion. Rice paddies suffered the most damage. In connection with this, Marcos launched an “emergency palay procurement” supposedly to help rice farmers.

Farmers said Marcos’s program came too late since farmers are already suffering during this harvest season. In Guimba, Nueva Ecija, 80% of rice had already been harvested and sold very cheaply. Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas data shows that wet palay farmgate price dropped to as low as ₱7 per kilo, while sun-dried palay farmgate price ranged from ₱13 to ₱14 per kilo in different parts of the country.

“We sink further into poverty. We can no longer recover, stuck neck-deep. We are in worse ordeal than a carabao stuck in mud,” a Guimba farmer said.

While mired in floods and poverty, farmers feel further insulted by bureaucrat capitalists’ exposed large-scale corruption of public funds, particularly in flood control and infrastructure projects. Many rural areas are suffering heavily from poorly planned and anomalous projects.

Further worsening this poverty are the Rice Liberalization Law and the widespread landlessness among farmers. The state last conservatively estimated that 72% of farms are not fully owned by farmers. This has been aggravated by the New Agrarian Emancipation Act and the Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling, which are merely repackaged versions of the rotten Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.

Rampant are evictions and land grabbing for land use conversion under the framework of Build-Better-More (BBM), mining, renewable or green energy projects, and others. The recently enacted 99-year Foreign Land Lease will further worsen all of these.