Peasant leaders call for land, justice
By RITCHE T. SALGADO
Bulatlat.com
CEBU CITY — More than 200 peasant leaders from 16 regions
and 65 provinces of the country gathered here this week to discuss decades-long
issues that continue to hound the agriculture sector.
Antonio Flores, newly-elected secretary general of the
Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), revealed that based on reports from
their regional and provincial chapters, landlessness brought about by new forms
of land-grabbing such as land conversion and abuses on farmers’ rights remain
to be the top concerns that continue to hinder the development of the sector.
He believes that the government’s Comprehensive Agrarian
Reform Program (CARP) and its renewed version, CARP-Extension with Reforms
(CARPer), is nothing but a sham that is being used by rich land-owners and
agricultural corporations in legitimizing abuses against farmers, majority of
whom have for generations been working on the land that do not “legally” belong
to them.
KMP believes that in order to solve the issue of
landlessness and to stop abuses, government must show sincere efforts in
addressing the problem by scrapping the bogus CARPer Law and replace it with
the Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill (GARB).
Authored by Anakpawis party-list representative Rafael “Ka
Paeng” Mariano, GARB aims to bring the true essence of agrarian reform into the
country, which is to give land to the farmers.
In contrast, under CARP, government buys the land from
landlords at bloated prices, and then sells it to the “farmer-beneficiaries”
who are required to pay every month for 30 years with yearly interest of six
percent.
“CARP is the most expensive and the longest-running agrarian
reform program in the world,” said KMP deputy secretary general Randall
Echanis.
By 2005, the Land Bank of the Philippines have approved
P41.6 billion ($1.014 billion) as compensation to landowners affected by CARP,
and for CARPer, government has allocated a budget of P150-billion ($3.658
billion) for its five year implementation from 2009 to 2014. Another
P150-billion ($3.658 billion) is to be allocated based on the proposed
extension of the program until 2019.
Echanis, who is also the third nominee of Anakpawis, said
that despite this, CARP remains to be a failure and the effort of government to
extend it for five more years after CARPer’s expiration in 2014, only shows
that the government is not concerned over the welfare of farmers who make up
majority of Filipinos.
Mariano agrees, saying: “Another extension of CARP is the
height of callousness of Aquino, a notorious cacique, to deny our rights to the
land in the face of the Filipino peasantry’s collective clamor for genuine land
reform.”
Echanis said the implementation of CARP is nothing more but
a sham, giving farmers a sense of false belief that they could finally own the
land that they till.
“It is nothing more but a way for then president Corazon
Cojuangco-Aquino to ensure that the Cojuangco’s Hacienda Luisita and other vast
haciendas in the country would be protected from land distribution,” said
Echanis.
He said that ever since CARP was implemented, human rights
violations against farmers have intensified. This includes extra-judicial
killings and enforced disappearances.
According to human rights watchdog Karapatan, during President
Benigno Aquino III’s term alone, from July 2010 to December 2012, there were
137 victims of extrajudicial killings, 77 were peasants; 25 were indigenous
people, whose struggle is also mostly agrarian; and 13 from the urban poor,
majority of whom were also farmers who have been displaced because of land
conversion.
Of the 14 cases of enforced disappearances, meanwhile, 11
were from the peasant sector.
“Farmers asserting their rights to the land are subjected to
human rights abuses, agrarian struggles and peasant leaders are being
criminalized, incarcerated, and worse, are being massacred,” the KMP said in a
statement.
“Simultaneously, CARPER serves as a counter-insurgency
program to drive away farmers from the militant and life and death struggle for
a genuine and truly distributive agrarian reform,” it continued.
Echanis admitted that as much as they want, they could not
stop the increasingly intensifying attacks against peasants asserting their
rights to land. However, what they could do is to put forward the struggles of
the peasants through mass actions that they plan to intensify in the coming
years.
These campaigns would include the bungkalan (land
cultivation), an assertion of a peasant group’s right to cultivate the land;
lakbayan or long marches; camp-outs, and peasant barricades, among others.
Echanis also said they plan to intensify their campaign for
the passing of GARB. However, he clarified that they have no illusion that it
will even pass the House of Representatives.
“Majority of the members of the House of Representatives are
large landowners, so it is expected that they will protect their interests,”
Echanis said.
“Still we will push for GARB’s passage because that is the
right thing to do. More than pushing for its passage in Congress, we would also
continue to take this campaign to the streets, engaging our members, who
compose majority of Filipinos,” he said.
“It is time to put an end to the more than 40 years of
deceptive, anti-farmer, and pro-landlord land reform that is being implemented
by the Aquino government,” said Echanis.
