PEASANT AND LABOR
2004: Toughest for Farmers, Workers
(First of two parts)

2004 may be called the year of economic and man-made disasters but between the two the silent killer was the drawn-out economic crisis where no amount of pledges by the elected president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, could allay fears among many Filipinos that their lives would be in a worse shape in 2005.

BY DABET CASTAÑEDA
With additional report by Bobby Tuazon
Bulatlat
 

All the public surveys conducted in 2004 showed the deterioration in the quality of life of the Filipino people, with some surveys revealing unprecedented starvation among the poor and signs of desperation in the coming year. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo herself admitted the country was in a state of fiscal crisis – a financial crisis actually, as far as progressive economists and critics are concerned.

Farmers rally in front of the Department of Agrarian Reform with palay and carabao Photo Alexander Martin Remollino

The nation was also hit by six whammies – the highest recorded rate of joblessness at mid-year; a series of fuel, power, water rate and transport fare hikes; and a yearly doze of calamities many of them man-made such as the landslides and flashfloods that devastated Quezon and other Luzon provinces. A great majority of the disaster victims were farmers in the rural areas and workers and urban poor in the cities.

Thus 2004 may be called the year of economic and man-made disasters. Between the two however the silent killer was the drawn-out economic crisis where no amount of pledges by the elected president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, could allay fears among many Filipinos that their lives would be in a worse shape in 2005.

With the nation unable to wriggle itself out of economic quagmire the most vulnerable social classes – the peasants and workers – were in far worse conditions. Organized farmers and workers tried to struggle out of the depredations that continued to make their lives miserable. But in many strikes and other protest actions that they launched in 2004, they found themselves victims of what their leaders called repressive state policies and brutal attacks by armed authorities.

The violent dispersal of many strikes staged by organized workers in Metro Manila and in many provinces and the massacre of seven striking plantation farmers at Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac attest to the scale of brutality that the country’s labor and peasant classes experienced during the year.

Leaving farms

National Statistics Office (NSO) reports for 2004 depict both grim and rosy pictures for the farmer and labor fronts, respectively. The NSO indicated a trend where more and more people are leaving their farms to look for income in the urban areas. In particular, it said, the number of employed persons in the agriculture, fisheries and forestry sectors fell from 11.3 million in 2003 to 11.14 million during the year. The sector’s share in the country’s labor force of 35.4 million (about 45 percent of the population), dropped from 37 percent to 35.4 percent during the period.

Registering in previous years a high share in the population distribution, only 55 percent of the country’s 80 million people were living in the rural provinces in 2004, the NSO also reported. Two-thirds of them continued to depend on agriculture, fisheries and forestry for livelihood, however.

The rural areas used to show a relative high employment rate, too. The fact however that the share of farmers and related income-earners has slid particularly within the past two years only shows that less and less land has become available for agricultural employment and there are no more jobs to spare for the rural poor.

Agricultural lands continue to be converted into commercial, residential and industrial lands thus reducing further the scope of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program’s (CARP) – a complete sham to the country’s millions of farmers. Coupled with the liberalization of trade imports that allows the dumping of cheap farm imports into the country, the reduction in land areas for agriculture has threatened the country’s overall food supply. In 2004, thousands of vegetable farmers all over the country took to the streets precisely to protest government’s import liberalization policy that gives them unfair competition from other countries.

2004 marked the 16th year of the implementation of the post-dictator agrarian reform program – CARP – the country’s fifth land reform scheme in 50 years. Started in 1988, CARP aimed to distribute lands to about 8.5 million tenant farmers in 10 years. Its implementation was extended to another 10 years or until 2008.

Over the years, CARP has been watered down not only through land conversions and by the stock distribution option (SDO) but also by reducing the number of hectares for distribution. From an original distribution target of 24 million hectares, CARP’s land coverage was reduced by phases until it became just 4.7 million hectares. In May, the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) reported that it has distributed 3.9 million hectares to some 1.9-million farm beneficiaries.

However, a Bulatlat investigative report in July revealed that even tenant-beneficiaries have lost their lands back to the landlords, industrialists and real estate developers. Other beneficiaries’ Emancipation Patents (EP), Certificate of Land Ownership Awards (CLOA) or Certificates of Land Title (CLT) were even cancelled to make way for industrialization or recreation purposes, the same report said.

Others are forced to sell back their land to the landlords for lack of capital to maintain production. Other lands are taken over by usurers or private lenders.

Land concentration

Danilo “Ka Daning” Ramos, secretary general of Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP or Peasant Movement in the Philippines) said that after 16 years of CARP land remains concentrated in the hands of a few landlord families while millions of small farmers and tenants are chained by feudal exploitation.

KMP statistics show that seven out of 10 farmers do not own the land they till: four out of seven farmers are beholden to private lenders or usurers.  

Landlessness, low farm productivity and sheer lack of jobs led to the worsening of poverty in the rural areas. In 2004, of every 10 poor Filipinos seven were living in the rural barrios. Furthermore, 70 percent of people living in the rural areas were poor.

CARP itself - instead of minimizing - apparently aggravated poverty in the rural areas. A World Bank (WB) study cited by Ibon Foundation in 1987 reported that the number of rural poor swelled from 2.3 million families in 1971 to 2.6 million families in 1983. The latest WB study showed that in the latest phase of CARP, i.e., 1997-2003, the number of rural poor families increased by more than 300,000.

With poverty came hunger. In October, the Social Weather Stations (SWS) disclosed that 15.1 percent of Filipino household heads it surveyed said their families had nothing to eat several times in the previous three months. This was triple the number of Filipinos who went hungry in 2003. This means that with roughly about 13.3 million families in the country, two million families or 12 million individuals – mostly living in the rural areas - can hardly eat three square meals a day.

With many of them receiving a weekly take-home pay of P9, 6,000 sugarcane farmers and mill workers at Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac had it enough and went on strike in November. The striking workers demanded, among others, the revocation of the SDO, which allowed the Cojuangcos in 1989 to evade land reform by converting their sprawling estate into a corporation. The strike however resulted in the massacre of seven striking workers on Nov. 16 and the slaying of another peasant leader a few weeks later.

Out of 6,400 original farm beneficiaries, 1,009 have lost their plantation jobs at Hacienda Luisita. Aside from Luisita, nine other sugar plantations in Negros, two sugar plantations in Iloilo and a banana plantation in Cagayan de Oro came under the SDO scheme.

The bloody repression of the farm workers’ struggle in Luisita, Ka Daning said, is proof that government’s agrarian reform program is actually tilted in favor of landlords.

Sugar imports

In Negros, the sugar industry took a beating from the importation of sugar from Thailand and Australia. Sugar producers decried the drop of mill gate price of raw sugar from P845-P870 a bag to P634 due to sugar imports. The United Sugar Producers’ Federation of the Philippines (Unifed) protested that at least 150,000 bags of sugar were brought to the country illegally and unloaded mostly in Cebu and Manila.

In October, about 5,000 farmers from Central Luzon, Southern Tagalog and the Bicol Region began a “farm strike” by leaving their farms to participate in a series of protest actions against poverty, landlessness and hunger. The farmers picketed the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) office in Quezon City and marched to Malacañang to call for an increase in palay (unhusked rice) selling prices – from P7-P9 to P15 a kilo. The protest actions were replicated in other regions of the country.

The farmers also demanded that the government, through the National Food Authority (NFA), buy 25 percent of the palay they produce and sell rice at a minimum of P16 per kilo. At present, the NFA buys only less than one percent of the farmers’ produce.

Under trade liberalization, Filipino rice farmers have faced stiff competition from Vietnam, Thailand and the U.S. In 2004, government imported 915,000 metric tons of rice compared to 800,000 metric tons in the preceding year. Bulatlat

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