Nearly two years after Ferdinand Marcos Jr. vowed to finally erase landlessness as the yoke that burdens Filipino peasants, hundreds, if not thousands of farmers who believe agrarian reform can be achieved without blood, sweat and tears, are again wailing and demanding that Marcos Jr. and DAR chief Conrado Estrella III stop putzing around and distribute land to them.
They realized that the business agenda of the regime is working at cross-purposes with the asset reform agenda that advocates really thought would make farmers with less than viable plots of land could become independent landowners and petty-bourgeois food producers. On June 10, 2024, the 36th anniversary of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), they are pitching camp again at the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) to condemn not only the fraudulent sharing of the more than 6,000 hectares of haciendas in Nasugbu, Batangas but the spate of land conversions and reversals of decisions that previously favored landless farmers.
Fact is, Joel Consing of Maharlika Investment Corp. (MIC) had been perorating about the plan of Malacanang to transform government-owned lands, about 1.2-million hectares in total, into agricultural estates to attract foreign investors, or use them for telco towers and solar energy farms, which is exactly the plan that led to Batangas farmers getting gypped and losing land in six Batangas haciendas to Roxas & Co. of the Roxases and Elizaldes, with infertile land going to them while the former landowners retained arable areas for use as solar energy farm of Leandro Leviste, the son of Sen. Loren Legarda, and for residential, industrial and commercial purposes. Business reporters, plutographers and plutocrats naturally hailed the deal that was passed off as a 40-year problem that the Marcos regime wanted resolved even if it meant throwing the farmers under the bus. Nothing succeeds like failure.
Leading the camp-in is Task Force Mapalad (TFM), whose members have been promised heaven but are still getting fried in the hell of landlessness. No less than 15 CARP advocates, along with two Roman Catholic prelates, have demanded the DAR to be forthright and stop bloviating and explain why the spirit and letter of CARP have been razed to the ground by DAR itself. Instead of pushing for the prompt distribution of CARP land to the farmers, what TFM and the other organizations got were numerous reversals in the Land Acquisition and Distribution (LAD) process, cancellations of Certificates of Land Ownership Awards (CLOA) and the excision of agricultural lands from CARP coverage.
Among the demands raised by the protesting farmers is the scrapping of what they said was “a non-redistributive scheme of CARP” in six Danding Cojuangco haciendas in Negros Occidental. TFM said the land should be distributed quickly and the ARBs must be installed. Moreover, the farmers urged DAR to reverse its order lifting the Notice of Coverage (NOC) of the land in Bugsuk Island, Palawan, owned by the late Danding Cojuangco, and stop reversals of decisions over land already covered by the LAD process in Boracay, Aklan and in Nasugbu, Batangas.
They assailed the reversals or “bigay-bawi/land return scheme” over landholdings of former Marcos cronies and other “sacred cows.” The farmers also called on DAR to implement the directive signed by DAR Undersecretary Kazel Celeste to proceed with the CARP coverage despite allegations on defective and erroneous documents from the farmers and the delaying tactics of landlords, many of whom were already paid by the government through the Agrarian Reform Fund (ARF.)
When Marcos Jr. touted a law that allowed farmers to skip payment of interest and principal on their amortization of their piece of land under CARP, the Palace trumpeted it as a most generous gift to the farmers burdened by Covid-19 and the double-barreled El Nino and La Nina climate disasters. He promised to erase landlessness and the bondage to the soil for peasants all over the country within his incumbency.
A cursory look at the DAR records proved that both the DAR and Malacanang were putzing around. From 1972 to 1986, the government of the late President Ferdinand E. Marcos should have implemented agrarian reform without any hindrance since he exercised both executive and legislative powers during martial law. In 14 years, agrarian reform covered only 15,061 hectares of compensable and 55,117 hectares of non-compensable land, which means land owned by the government or its instrumentalities, and benefited only 33,810 beneficiaries, or 2,415 beneficiaries annually. The lot size per farmer was a low 1.63 hectares.
