By RAIZZA P. BELLO
Bulatlat.com
ALIAGA, NUEVA ECIJA – Bernardo Trinidad picked up a pale brown palay (rice). He held it by his wrinkly palm and stared at it for a moment.
“In farming, your harvest isn’t certain unless it’s already in a sack,” Trinidad said in Filipino as the flooded palay cannot be sold anymore.
Trinidad is one among hundreds of farmers who lost parcels of their agricultural lands due to the construction of the government-initiated Central Luzon Link Expressway (CLLEX) Phase 1, spanning around 30 kilometers from the provinces of Tarlac to Nueva Ecija in the Philippines.
Like many of the aggrieved farmers, Trinidad further lamented how the infrastructure seemingly worsened the flooding across remaining rice fields – all of these environmental losses submerging them in deeper financial debts.
This is a debt cycle all too familiar from the national to the community scene: As the Philippines loan burden rises from internationally-funded projects like the P11.8-billion (USD 200, 218, 740) CLLEX, local farmers are forced to constantly borrow money to sustain their livelihoods and families for day-to-day survival.
Constant land displacement
Trinidad, also fondly called Tatay (father) Deng by relatives and neighbors, has been farming in Aliaga in Nueva Ecija since he was 21 years old. He was thrown into it after stopping his studies, as his parents couldn’t afford him to finish a formal education because of poverty.
While their family toiled in the rice fields for decades, they never owned the lands.
“You’re like a slave at work. The Spaniards were brutal when dealing with lands,” Tatay Deng, now 73, recalled in Filipino about the Spanish hacienderos or hacienderas who lorded over some agricultural lands in their little town in the 1970s.
In the 19th century, Spanish colonizers took over large rice and sugarcane plantations, also known as haciendas, in Central Luzon. Given this history, the area has been a priority for implementing the comprehensive agrarian reform program which aimed to distribute lands to farmers since the late 1960s until today.
Although Tatay Deng made efforts to acquire an official document, he never secured a formal land title for their agricultural lots. He did not see the need for it, until the building of a national expressway across Central Luzon was made known to him as early as 2015.
Local farmers who spoke with Bulatlat shared that they felt they were only informed, rather than genuinely consulted about the infrastructure. Since this is a national government project, under law, they couldn’t oppose it.
“They just told us our farm lands will be affected and promised we will be compensated for it,” Tatay Deng said in Filipino.
Part of the Build, Build, Build Program in partnership with the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), the CLLEX aims to decongest traffic, improve access to food baskets, and act as a gateway for tourism across regions. It got its Environmental Compliance Certificate as early as March 2010, and only commenced construction in 2016.
The project pushed through at the expense of displacing hundreds of families and farmers, especially in Aliaga, altering 432 lots as of September 2024 DPWH data. This covered a loss of about 104 hectares, many of which are agricultural lands.
According to the country’s right-of-way (ROW) law, wherein private property may be taken by the government for public use, the affected land owners and farmers are entitled to prompt just compensation. But like Tatay Deng, who lost 6,122 square meters of rice fields for an expressway, many are still yet to be paid due to their lack of compliance with government requirements such as land titles.
The DPWH Unified Project Management Office (UPMO), the CLLEX proponent, explained that several local and national government agencies who have authority on settling land issues are involved in the process. While they acknowledge that the requirements are challenging to accomplish, they said its fulfillment is also necessitated by the law.
Tatay Deng has spent more than P100,000 (USD 1, 697) and two years to process his own land title. He is awaiting word regarding his submission of requirements in 2022, and when he would finally receive compensation.
This tedious and expensive process usually forces farmers to settle with government-determined land valuations or entirely give up on getting just compensation, shared lawyer Jobert Pahilga of Sentro Para sa Tunay na Repormang Agraryo (SENTRA), a long-running non-government organization (NGO) that provides free legal aid to farmers and indigenous peoples on land issues.
On average, it takes at least five years to be awarded just compensation, he added. This, for low valued agricultural lots such as in Aliaga, where affected farmers are being given P135 (USD 2.30) per square meter of land based on sourced documents.
Flooding, debts, and involving locality
“Sometimes, progress is not parallel with the environment,” said Engineer Manuel Monfort, one of the CLLEX project engineers from DPWH UPMO. He shared that destruction is inevitable with building infrastructure and in the expressway’s case, they chose the area with lesser negative impacts based on feasibility studies.
But some households and farmers in Aliaga have experienced greater impacts, observing that floods within particular areas and farm lands have worsened since the CLLEX’s construction. When it rains for three days straight, they said palay becomes submerged as high as knee-deep in water.
Engineer John Lerry Bautista, acting municipal agriculturist at the Aliaga Municipal Agricultural Office (MAO), explained that rice is a water crop so its management in the rice fields is important.
“Too much water will cause burden to the crops and farmers,” he said, adding that it can affect the quality of palay. This may lead to a chain of effects on the volume of produce, price of palay, income of farmers, and the local economy.
For farmers like Tatay Deng who already suffer these realities, there’s no escaping a life of debts exacerbated by a new expressway.
“All of my farming is sustained through borrowing money,” he said in Filipino. “Before you knead mud, you are already buried in debt.”
During each farming season, Tatay Deng needs approximately P50,000 (USD 848.30) for the production costs. He usually pays off his debts to traders with harvested palay or negotiates for more time.
He even likened farming to playing a gamble, explaining that debts only grow as tools get more expensive, the climate is vastly changing, and palay prices remain cheap and volatile.
Based on Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) data, the price of 1 kilogram of palay grew by around 6 pesos from 2010 to 2023 on average in Central Luzon. This means that there’s only a 38.73 percent price increase per kilogram of palay in the past 14 years, despite significantly rising production costs.
Aliaga MAO’s data also suggest a decrease in rice yield from 2021 to 2024. Previously, farmers harvested around 100 cavans per hectare in a season; now, only 35 cavans are harvested.
Bautista explained this is caused by several factors including water shortage (El Niño), typhoons, and sudden rains. But if the flood control continues to be ineffective, he emphasized that this situation will escalate and it can kill the economic market of the municipality.
In response to the flooding issue, the DPWH UPMO said that sufficient drainage systems have been built within ROW limits of the CLLEX. They also suggested that there’s a need to improve and maintain the water system of the whole province to resolve the crisis.
Aliaga municipal officials told Bulatlat that while studies are needed to fully understand the current flood predicament, it must also be recognized that risks differ from actual impacts. Moving forward, they proposed that close coordination and policy creation between national and local governments should be strengthened to prepare for such possible impacts and consider project alternatives.
Agriculture involves infra
Infrastructure is part of agriculture because the food needs to reach consumers, said Dr.Ted Mendoza, a scientist and one of the founders of Magsasaka at Siyentipiko Para sa Pag-unlad ng Agrikultura (MASIPAG). MASIPAG is a farmer-led network of peoples’ organizations, NGOs, and scientists, established in the 1980s in response to the growing rice crisis in the Philippines.
But he argued that the Philippines is much behind in terms of transport systems that’s why many communities and environmental resources are being negatively affected by infrastructure works. And while roads, which he called the “artery of development” enable access and creation of establishments, Mendoza asserted that trains or railways are the cheaper, faster, and energy cost efficient option.
“Why were our train networks neglected in favor of expressways?” he asked in Filipino. “Japan has been one of our biggest funders ever since. What products of theirs would benefit if they help us?”
Mendoza claimed that expressways are being built for Japan to sell more cars, adding that it is a business practice being done by the United States and China when funding infrastructure projects of other countries, too.
Analysis of available National Economic Development Authority data suggests that Japan, which also funded the CLLEX, has been consistently a top lender for infrastructure ventures in the Philippines within the last 10 years. Although funding for projects has been increasing, the country’s percentage of debt compared to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is also on the rise at 57.52 percent as of 2022 based on International Monetary Fund data.
Apart from the piling environmental and economic burdens from the local to the national levels brought about by rapid urbanization, Mendoza warned that widespread conversion of agricultural lands will also adversely impact the Philippines’ food security.
Central Luzon remains the top rice producer in the country with the province of Nueva Ecija, hailed as the center of rice granary, contributing an average of 49 percent of the total volume of the region’s produce for the past two decades, according to PSA data.
The trend suggests that there is an increase in rice production within the region. But Mendoza explained that the country isn’t producing enough to match the food demand of the growing population. This, amid decreasing agricultural lands and a climate crisis that leaves farmers in deeper debts and to restart by themselves every time crops are destroyed by floods or dry spells, he added.
These days, Tatay Deng wakes up before the sun rises, drinks his coffee, and rides his bike towards the nearest rice field parallel to his own plot. He parks his bike and then walks for a bit across the farm lands to reach a part of his own palayan, planting and checking on his different crops. Then Tatay Deng climbs up the CLLEX, crosses over its fence and the road to reach the other side of his remaining parcel of land.
This is a taxing routine he does daily even in his old age. He constantly worries if and when rains will destroy his harvest again, and how much more difficult their path to the rice fields will be once vehicles in the expressway are in full throttle.
A week before this story’s publication, Tatay Deng stood once again across his flooded rice fields, a third occurrence this year, due to Super Typhoon Pepito (Man-yi), the Philippines’ 16th tropical cyclone this 2024. He’s relieved that, this time, palay was already harvested before the rains hit. But he remains troubled by the debts to follow once farming resumes in December.
With the rate of how floods are going, Tatay Deng thinks the worst may still happen. He says, now it may only be the rice fields, but in the future, the rains may inundate the town of Aliaga and other villages.
“We really don’t know what else can happen because it’s the weather that really commands our fate,” he asserted in Filipino. (RVO)
This story was produced with the support of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network as part of the Media Action on Sustainable Infrastructure in the Philippines Project.
