More than 500 peasants from Southern Tagalog and Central Luzon trooped to the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) office in Quezon City to hold the agency accountable for its inutility and neglect in resolving the long-pending land cases filed by farmers. The peasants also denounced 38 years of inutility of the Philippine government’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

According to the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP, or Philippine Peasant Movement), nearly four decades of CARP’s existence and implementation further intensified landlessness among poor peasants. Seven out of every 10 farmers remain without land of their own, while lands are increasingly auctioned to foreign interests for renewable energy projects, ecotourism, and export-oriented plantations.

The KMP added that CARP has become a mere symbol of the failure of fake land reform rooted in the government’s neoliberal policies. It said farmers have long condemned CARP as the reactionary government’s longest-running, most expensive, and bloodiest sham land program.

KMP explained that millions of farmers remain landless, buried in debt, and vulnerable to eviction and loss of livelihood because CARP did not dismantle the monopolistic control of landlords and capitalists over vast haciendas, plantations, and private landholdings. CARP instead allowed land grabbing and land-use conversion, exemptions of vast estates, stock distribution options, and other schemes that protect landlord interests.

Farmers’ testimonies also denounced and exposed the impact of the DAR and World Bank’s Support to Parcelization of Land Titles (SPLIT) program, the New Agrarian Emancipation Act, and the distribution of Certificates of Condonation Release of Mortgage (COCROM), which the Marcos regime currently uses to deceive farmers.

They also held the Marcos regime accountable for its role as a primary peddler of land to foreign interests. The first to benefit from the regime’s 99-Year Investor Land Lease Act includes the 1,620 hectares in New Clark City, which the US Pax Silica initiative will turn into an AI technology hub.

Peasants in a “street conference” declared that CARP is useless and that the only path is to struggle for genuine land reform. Led by the Katipunan ng Samahang Magbubukid ng Timog Katagalugan (or Alliance of Farmers’ Associations in Southern Tagalog), protesters burned symbols of the regime’s anti-farmer policies, including SPLIT, COCROM, and NAEA.

—report by Pambansang Katipunan ng mga Magbubukid (PKM, or National Peasants Alliance)