Nothing should be celebrated in Del Monte company’s 100 years of plunder and violence against the land and labor of the Filipino people, the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) declared. This refers to the company’s attempt to beautify its image for the scheduled “celebration” of its century-long presence in the Philippines.

Del Monte’s crimes of plunder and violence against workers, farmers, and Lumad communities whom it displaced from their land keep piling up. The company’s environmental destruction, depriving hundreds of people of livelihood, grabbing of ancestral lands, and killings of those who resist are far from its prettified image of “corporate social responsibility.”

Its victims include Renato Anglao, a Lumad leader killed in 2017. He actively defended the ancestral land against Del Monte’s plantation expansion in Quezon, Bukidnon. He was among many other Lumad and farmers targeted by big companies, in collusion with the reactionary state, for opposing the land grabbing by commercial plantations in Mindanao.

Behind the company’s praise for its so-called “free housing, electricity, and water” for selected workers lies a rampant policy of massive contractualization, starvation wages, and backbreaking labor in the plantation.

Del Monte began its operations in Bukidnon back in the 1920s. it never returned the lands it “borrowed” from the Lumad. In the late 1990s, the plantation was placed under a bogus land reform program which supposedly distributed the land to workers but was later reclaimed through long-term leaseback and contract-growing schemes. The dispossessed and ordinary farmworkers remained landless while they were made to appear as the legitimate landowners.

The plantation severely destroyed the land and environment of Bukidnon, according to KMP. Planting a single crop (monocropping) on thousands of hectares required the company to use toxic pesticides and chemicals that eventually poisoned the soil. These chemicals caused serious health problems not only to the workers but also to the communities inside and around the plantation.

Throughout the company’s century of plunder, foreign capitalists and the local bourgeoisie have alternated in owning the company and reaping its billions in profits. From its original American owners, it was taken over by the Lorenzo family of Lapanday Foods in the 1900s, and later by San Miguel Corporation in the 2000s. Today, it is owned by the Campos family, the same group that owns NutriAsia. NutriAsia is notorious for its exploitation, contractualization, and violence against its workers.