The groups decried that landlord violence against peasants, especially those who assert their economic and political rights, is reinforced by the heavy-handed repression carried out by the military, police and paramilitary groups such as the notorious Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Unit (CAFGU).
Thus their battle cry is it to bring the call for genuine agrarian reform onto the national agenda, as both the correct way to modernize agriculture, develop the rural and national economy, and most importantly, uplift the economic and socio-cultural conditions of more than two-thirds of the population.
They are also calling for the rejection of the CARL, more so its proposed extension by the Arroyo regime past 2008, even as progressive parliamentarians are taking up the cudgels for the peasants in filing a bill containing most of the elements of genuine agrarian reform. Nonetheless, with a landlord-dominated Congress, the alliance expressed a healthy amount of skepticism that such a bill would be passed without overhauling the stranglehold of landlord and other domestic and foreign elite interests in the economy and the state.
The PATRIA initiative is important and relevant to the entire nation and not just to the rural folk whose unrelenting clamor for land and rural justice underlies the intractable armed conflicts that continue to rage in the countryside. Only the path of genuine agrarian reform coupled with national industrialization can in truth lead the nation to economic prosperity, social justice and equality as well as lasting peace. Business World/(Bulatlat.com)
