by a member of the Campaign To Support A Just and Liberating Peace in the Philippines
The life of the vast majority of the peasants in the Philippines is harsh and brutal. Most of the people living in rural areas are landless farmers and poor peasants, exploited by large landlords and multi-national corporations (MNCs). The landlords and MNCs are more interested in profit than in feeding their tenants and workers, so they predominately grow food for export. As a result, the poor peasants and agricultural workers who till the land often do not have enough to eat themselves.
The people of the Philippines have demanded basic land reform for many years. The U.S.-Ramos regime, like earlier puppet regimes, is not interested in genuine land reform that will help the people, but rather in maintaining a system of semi-colonialism that benefits foreign investment capital. But with the assistance of the New People's Army and the National Democratic Front the peasants are able to fight for genuine land reform.
Feudal exploitation continues
Seventy percent of the population of the Philippines lives in the countryside, where feudal patterns of land ownership continue to predominate. Only 5% of the total number of landowners control 43% the total landownings, and the top 0.5% of landowners control 21% of the total farming area. The majority of the landowning population (67%) owns small plots of seven acres or less.
The vast tracts of land owned by the big landlords are tilled and made productive by a mass of peasants who pay various forms of feudal rent to the landlords. Seven out of every ten peasants do not own the land they till. Share-tenancy remains the predominant form of tenurial arrangement. Under share-tenancy, landlords get from 40% to 90% of the produce as land rent.
Besides collecting rent for the land, landlords devalue the price of the crops to be sold; profit from the trade of imported means of production (e.g. seed and fertilizers); require rental of machinery etc. They practice usury, often loaning money at interest rates as high as 20% per month (that's 740% per year!).
Those peasants who own less than seven acres often cannot live off these small plots. One-third of these small cultivators have to work as seasonal farm workers in order to feed their families.
Most tilling of the land is done by hand. Advanced technological equipment is used primarily by MNCs for high value export crops such as pineapples and bananas.
U.S.-Ramos regime's phony industrialization
Under the guise of land reform, the U.S.-Ramos regime has increased the conversion of agrarian land for other uses in a phony effort to boost industrialization and appease international financial interests under the cover of becoming a "newly industrialized country" by the year 2000.
The Philippines 2000 plan put forth by Ramos as a significant plan to industrialize the nation, involves further under-development export-oriented, import-dependent industry and agriculture, controlled largely by international finance. The IMF and the Asian Development Bank make loans based on whether they will be used for export-based industries or not, and how well companies serve the interests of international finance capital.
Ramos is interested in industrializing the country-but the industrialization is geared towards export of semi-manufactured and cheap labor-intensive assembly products. This kind of industrialization does not adequately build up the infrastructure and allow the country to become more independent, rather it increases the Philippine economy's dependence on foreign markets and foreign imports. These foreign markets often contain protective tariffs to insure that their markets are not flooded by cheap products from the Philippines.
Phony agrarian reform
Agrarian Reform has been something that is periodically discussed by the various comprador big bourgeoisie governments in the Philippines to try to limit the number of poverty stricken and exploited peasants who take up arms against the government and big landlord bourgeoisie-under the leadership of the CPP, NDF and NPA.
The illusion of land reform is usually given by the formal transfer of land to a few peasants, while quietly much more land goes into the hands of private capitalists. For example, during the Marcos regime, much was made of the 1538 hectares of land given to 1684 tenants (who were supposed to receive 3-5 hectares of land depending on irrigation of the land), but at the same time 267 corporations acquired 86,017 hectares of land. So much for agrarian reform!
Additionally, the massive land and crop conversions corporations and big landlords resort to in order to avoid land reform have actually created more landless peasants than before. Many laws have been created to allow landlords and industries to reclassify their land (for grazing, or industrialization) making it unavailable for land reform.
The Philippine Congress and the judiciary are firmly in the pockets of the landlord class. Most of the stipulations of laws, legal changes, and interpretations of the laws benefit the big landlord class, not the poor and middle peasants. For example: Land is only available for agrarian reform if it is being used as agricultural land, so companies and government agencies convert the land to other uses. This has encouraged with the destruction of arable land, In many cases the landowners evict farmers, bulldoze land, or physically destroy crops in order to claim "land use conversion" and therefore maintain ownership of the land.
When land is given over to the peasants, it is usually only temporary. Tenants are allowed to buy their land through amortization (much like a mortgage). Because the prices of the crops are still depressed by the big comprador landlord class in order to retain the land, most of these lands revert back to the big landlords again. Some statistics demonstrate that, at best, less than 2% of the land is actually kept by the peasants.
Land to the tiller!
The struggle for land is a very bloody one. Peasants and agrarian workers, continually struggle to defend themselves and their land. Their desire for real land reform is always met by brutal resistance from big landowners and MNCs who engage in all kinds of suppression, including legal maneuverings, extralegal bribes and tricks, illegal evictions and land conversions and brute force tactics. More than two million peasants have been displaced since the Government of the Republic of the Philippines launched "total war" against the revolutionary movement in the countryside. These evictions are often thinly disguised land-grabs by landlords and officers in the military.
Since their beginnings, the National Democratic Front and other national democratic organizations like the Peasant Movement of the Philippines (KMP) have worked to basic agrarian reform in the countryside. The KMP's minimum program eliminates usury, high rent and ensures that farm workers receive reasonable wages.
The New People's Army (NPA) organizes and defends land seizures from the worst landlords. The peasants in the Philippines believe that the land belongs to them, the people who till it. The NPA makes sure that the military and the landlords' paid thugs do not make reprisal attacks when the peasants confiscate and plant the landlords' land. The NPA also defends forests from rampant logging operations.
The U.S. Ramos regime cannot carry out agrarian reform because it wants to maintain the semi-colonial, semi-feudal and dependent nature of the Philippine economy. Genuine land reform requires self-sufficiency and real change in the economic structure and that can only be achieved through the national democratic revolution in the Philippines. The struggles of the peasants in the Philippines for land reform are central to the revolution that will end the imperialist exploitation of the people of the Philippines.
References:
The Peasant Education and Development Center, "Agrarian Directions," June 1995.
"Voices From the Grassroots: Report of the National Conference on Land Use Conversion and Agrarian Reform," Oct 1994.
Juliet de Lima Sison, "On the Mode of Production," PRAKSIS, Sep 94.
Peasant Movement of the Philippines (KMP), "Peasant Update," Jun 94