A Year of Disquiet for the Filipino Farmers

Definitely, the Macapagal-Arroyo administration's adherence to trade liberalization and other globalization prescriptions made life more miserable for farmers and fisherfolk in 2003. Poverty levels in the rural areas went up even further. Based on surveys conducted during the year, most rural Filipinos rated themselves poorer compared to previous periods.

By Bobby Tuazon
Bulatlat.com

In 2003, it was not all quiet in the rural countryside. The impact of government's distorted economic policies and its continued subscription to trade liberalization has been most severe among the country's millions of peasant families. The year 2003 was no different, only this time peasants showed signs of restiveness and open resistance again - the inevitable result of age-old oppression and enslavement under the landlord-dominated rural economy.

Only last Dec. 1, a community of Subanen peasant villagers tore down the barbed wire that separated them from 189 hectares of ancestral land they had been cultivating for decades in Barangay Lipay, Jose Daman town in Zamboanga del Norte. The fence was put up by the provincial government last August for a supposed livestock breeding center which, provincial authorities said, would give them jobs. The Subanens knew it was just a trick to evict them from their land.

The organized land reclamation staged by the Subanens - one of the country's poorest ethnic tribes in the highlands of southern Philippines - climaxed a three-year struggle to reclaim their ancestral land.

Early this year, in Benguet province, northern Philippines vegetable farmers protested en masse against the importation of cheap farm products that left most of their potatoes, cabbages and carrots either unsold or rotting on the fields. They protested that unless cheap farm imports are stopped from flooding the local markets, the country's vegetable industry - the source of income to many upland and lowland farmers - would die.

Negros Island in Western Visayas (central Philippines) is the country's sugar capital. After nearly two decades of slump, the sugar industry continues to allow the concentration of land to a few big landlords, among them former Marcos crony Eduardo Cojuangco, Jr. Hence, the island remains a major flashpoint of agrarian disputes.

Last September, tens of thousands of Negros' organized sugar farm workers cried for the end of social injustice by organizing a new umbrella organization of several farmers' groups. Called the Negros Coordinating Council for Genuine Land Reform (NCC-GLR), the new umbrella was formed at the end of a series of mass protests by farm workers during "Tiempo Muerto" - the season of death among hungry peasant families. NCC-GLR seeks, among others, to mobilize support to the farmers' cause and struggle for land from the church, academe and professionals.

Anti-Bush visit

These various forms of mass struggle were duplicated in many other villages across the country, sometimes in more militant forms. And many farmers especially those in Southern and Central Luzon also found themselves marching side by side with other activists and anti-imperialists during the days-long protests against U.S. President George W. Bush's visit in Manila last October. They called for an end to the U.S.' war on terror as well as to continued militarization in the Philippine countryside.

The peasant mass protests in 2003 once more underscored the strains and conflicts that arise from the country's semi-feudal structures. These structures are governed by the monopoly of land ownership and centuries-old tenancy problem, the destitution of landless peasants, low wages - all made worse by government's sham land reform, pro-capitalist adherence to trade liberalization and other globalization prescriptions.

Land reform authorities proclaimed the success of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) as they celebrated its 15th year. They said that more than 50 percent of agricultural land has been redistributed but they could not explain why large haciendas where many tenant families and migrant workers still toil have not been broken up.

In previous years, many large landholdings that would have been covered by CARP were converted into agro-corporate, commercial or residential lands leaving hundreds of thousands of tenant families without hope of owning land. The reconcentration of land among the country's landlords is most palpable in the sugar sector. Recent reports reveal that of the total 532,180 hectares of sugar lands in the country, 79 percent is owned by only four percent of the population today.

Many local executives were accused of being in cahoots with the landlords themselves in denying farmers of their right to own land. In Negros Occidental, the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW) uncovered a memorandum of agreement (MoA) among provincial, military and police officials submitting agrarian reform under the province's "development priorities." The NFSW called the MoA "an old trick of big landlord-compradors and state bureaucrats" to force peasants to accept land reconcentration and an agro-industrial development scheme.

Trade liberalization

In 1994, then Sen. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo sponsored the ratification of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that eventually led to the country's membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Ignoring farmers' calls for the abrogation of the GATT due to its devastating impact on their livelihood, Macapagal-Arroyo, as president, went even further by pushing for the Farmer as Importer Program whereby ironically rice producers were also asked to engage in rice importation.

In 2003, the program was exposed as a source of "technical smuggling" by big rice traders who used farmers organizations as "dummies" to secure import allocations amounting to hundreds of millions of pesos. Many farmers' groups who allowed themselves to be used as "dummies" were even reportedly short-changed, saying that they were only paid from PhP300,000 to PhP400,000 instead of the PhP40 milion-PhP80 million as promised by the government National Food Authority (NFA). As a result, the country became the world's fifth largest rice importer - a dismal performance compared to the time the country was a prime rice exporter.

The NFA proved to be an agency that not only tried to cripple the country's rice productivity and food self-sufficiency through importation but also ensured the country's rice industry under the control of private corporations. Early in the year, the plan to privatize the NFA was uncovered as actually a scheme of the Macapagal-Arroyo administration under a not-so-secret project, called AGILE, that was funded by the USAID.

One million jobs

To belie allegations that her administration was out to destroy the country's rice agriculture through her commitments to trade liberalization, Macapagal-Arroyo came up with her "one-million jobs for farmers and fisherfolk" program. The employment plan was implemented under the Hybrid Rice Commercialization Program (HRCP) that sought to popularize the use of hybrid rice varieties that promised 25 percent bigger yield than the ordinary rice.

During the year, militant farmers organizations led by the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP - Peasant Movement in the Philippines) together with progressive scientists and environmentalists opposed the program as inherently flawed and for its false claim of giving jobs to the farmers. HRCP was also assailed as making rice agriculture dependent on the importation of foreign technology to sustain it thus increasing the ordinary farmer's debt burdens.

Trade liberalization in agriculture was equally devastating to vegetable farmers. In 2003, vegetable farmers had to contend with the dumping of cheap farm imports in the local market. Since the country's entry into WTO in 1995, vegetable production has dropped by more than 8 percent, or from 1 million MT-high in 1994 to 700,000MT in 2000. Despite the GATT's devastating effect on the vegetable farmers, the Macapagal-Arroyo administration in 2003 made sure that the country's tariff reductions on vegetable imports were on schedule.

Definitely, the Macapagal-Arroyo administration's continued adherence to trade liberalization and other globalization prescriptions under terms dictated by the WTO made life more miserable to farmers and fisherfolk in 2003. Poverty levels in the rural areas - where three out of four Filipinos live - deteriorated even further particularly in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), Bicol and Eastern Visayas. Based on surveys conducted during the year, most rural Filipinos rated themselves poorer compared to previous periods.

With or without the elections in May, these oppressive conditions will enflame millions of farmers even more in 2004. Bulatlat.com

Back to top

We want to know what you think of this article.