Filipino peasants told its time to quit 16th century

Press, 4 April 1987, Page 21

Filipino peasants told its time to quit 16th century

In July, 1986, about 100 farm labourers marched across a local landlord’s fields, planted a new crop of rice,and claimed the land as their own. LOUISE ASHLEY reports from Manila on the Philippines’ first post-Marcos peasant “guerrillas.”

Militant farm workers in the - Philippines who could not wait for the Aquino Government to fulfil its promise to redistribute land, have since last July seized thousands of hectares of rice, sugar, and com land across the country and thousands more have been “assessed and targeted.” The most serious problem facing the Philippines today, the Minister for Agrarian Reform explained from his Manila office, is that you drive 60 kilometres out of the modem capital and step straight back into the sixteenth century. The key to recovery and future stability in the Philippines, the Minister, Heherson Alvarez, said, is a programme which will drag the millions of peasants still living under semi-feudal conditions into the modern age. Such a programme, he added, requires a radical redistribution of rural wealth through land reform. In the face of widespread poverty and hunger, a bloody communist insurgency, and an increasingly militant peasant movement, no issue is seen here as more fundamental nor more urgent than land reform. It is the issue which brought 10,000 protesting farmers to Manila in February and left 15 of them dead after marines opened fire when the farmers attempted to push through their barricades and march on the palace. It is the issue which sent the Finance Minister, Jaime Ongpin, to Europe, cap in hand, where he managed to secure a $lOOO million “soft” loan from the Paris club for stage one of the Government’s crucial land reform package — a package which Ongpin recently said may require the readjustment of this year’s national budget In the Philippines, only ten per cent of the population owns 90 cent of the 9.5 million hec-

tares of cultivated land. The February "revolution" of last year chased away some of the wealthiest “crony” landlords but left landlord and tenant relationships intact and enormous sugar and coconut plantations untouched. One year after the Aquino Government came to power, senior officials and foreign diplomats are privately conceding that the long-term survival of the moderate political forces depends largely upon the implementation of genuine land reform. . Seventy per cent of the country’s 57 million people live in rural areas and the same percentage of the population lives below the poverty line. Ten million rural dwellers actually have jobs; about two million hold leases or own their own land. For the Aquino Government, continuing poverty and landlessness in the countryside means a continuing communist insurgency — an 18-year-old guerrilla war which claimed 10 lives a day in 1986. From the ranks of the hungry farmers come the armed communist “red fighters” and the allimportant civilian support base which is prepared to conceal and feed the revolutionaries in exchange for the compulsory land reform programmes forced upon land owners in rural communities controlled by, the communist forces. While under the Marcos regime “land grabbing” was the domain of the underground armed communist forces, under the Aquino Government the legal but militant peasants group, the K.M.P. (Kilusang Magbubukid Ng Pilipinas), has adopted as a policy priority, a systematic programme of “land confiscation.” Government officials are well aware that groups of peasants across the country have claimed numejpus plots since the first

farm workers from Laguna, south of Manila, picked up their ploughs last year, and the K.M.P. has targeted another 40,000 hectares to be occupied this year. Since the shooting of the protesting farmers in Manila earned the Ministry of Agrarian Reform the label “Barbarian Reform,” the Aquino Government has been rushing out details of an ambitious $lO billion land reform programme 7 which will carve up four million of the 9.5 million hectares of cultivated land. ■ Tenanted rice and corn lands — the subject of the token land reform efforts of the Marcos regime — will go first, with no land owner being permitted to retain more than seven hectares. The large sugar and coconut plantations pose a more difficult problem as carving up this land into plots would be economically disastrous. For the moment, the Government has settled on a vague Voluntary co-operative scheme to be implemented some time into the 19905. That the Aquino' Government is still $9 billion short is a matter of some controversy despite this month’s announcement that the $2 million expected to be raised by the sale of non-perfomiing assets would be put towards land reform. -, While the Government -has insisted that the owners of all redistributed lands must be justly compensated through payments made by peasants and Government subsidies, the militant peasant groups want the land distributed free. The Minister for Agrarian Reform conceded that land redistributed is considered a moral Issue here and that the Government was unlikely to take the political risks involved in moving occupy; ing farmers off the land. This attitude, he said, could well provide an incentive for an accelerated “land grab” programme. Copyright— -London Observer