AGRARIAN REFORM AND THE

DIFFICULT ROAD TO PEACE IN

The Philippine agricultural sector is characterized by unequal and highly skewed land ownership. When the Spanish
colonialists introduced the encomienda and hacienda system, control over vast tracts of land fell into the hands of a very
small landowning class, dispossessing a mass of peasants of the land that they and their ancestors had been tilling for
generations. With this process of dispossession, colonial rule resulted in the peasantry experiencing poverty, exploitation, and
oppression. Inequalities in land ownership resulted in armed agrarian unrest and saw the birth of rural social movements that
demanded the breaking of the land monopoly. At various times in the country’s history various land reform laws were passed
purportedly to promote agrarian justice by reforming a land property rights regime that favors only a few.

From the 1950s onward the land reform laws that were implemented, such as the Agricultural Tenancy Reform Act and the
Agricultural Leasehold Act, among others, tended to be mere concessions to tenants and were insufficient to bring about
fundamental changes in the structure of land ownership. These policies did not transfer ownership to peasants and merely
focused on regulating production relations between landowners and tenants. In 1972 Presidential Decree no. 27 under
former president Ferdinand Marcos offered a limited land redistribution window by covering only rice and corn lands. It was
implemented mainly in Central Luzon, a hotbed of peasant insurgency and the birthplace of the New People’s Army (NPA)
(Borras et al., 2009: 5; Reyes, 2002: 8ff.)
After Marcos was ousted through the People Power revolution in 1986, organized farmers and their supporters demanded the
immediate passage of a law on agrarian reform. A broad alliance called the Congress for a People’s Agrarian Reform proposed
what was called the People’s Agrarian Reform Code in an attempt to pressure the new government of President Corazon
Aquino to implement agrarian reform. On January 22nd 1987 the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (Peasant Movement of the
Philippines), then the largest peasant movement in the country, organized a huge march of peasants to demand the immediate
implementation of genuine agrarian reform. The marchers clashed with the police, leading to the infamous “Mendiola
Massacre”, which caused the death of 13 farmers and injuries to more than a hundred protesters (see Gavilan, 2015). In
response to the sustained pressure from various peasant groups, Congress finally enacted the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform
Program (CARP) in 1988.

CARP was supposed to be the watershed in the Philippine peasants’ struggle for land (Franco, 2008: 995) and demands for
social justice from below. Twenty-seven years later, however, demands for agrarian reform continue.
WHY LAND REFORM?

More than half of the Philippine population lives in rural areas. Forty percent of land is attributed to the agricultural sector, employing
about one-third of all Filipinos. This sector, however, contributes only 11.3% of GDP (World Bank, n.d.). Yet for a long time, vast tracts of
the country’s best agricultural lands had been in the hands of a very few landowners. This contributed directly to widespread poverty in
rural areas. A comprehensive land reform program was deemed necessary to address rural poverty, with landless farmers and tenants
among the most affected groups (ADB, 2009: 3).

Agrarian reform is important to rural democratization and the land-dependent rural poor’s enjoyment of basic human rights. Philippine
society is shaped by a land-based power structure and regional rural elites’ control of vast tracts of land serves as their ticket to elective
office. They are able to perpetuate themselves in power through patron-client relationships. Tenants and ordinary people living on
haciendas are normally beholden to hacienda owners through strict social regulation. Most often, these hacienda-bounded rural citizens
are unable to exercise their basic rights to association and to vote. These regional elites undermine traditional and indigenous concepts of
land ownership and restrict poor peoples’ political ability to claim land rights (Franco, 2008: 994). The 1988 land reform law was therefore
a crucial measure to break up these undemocratic structures by targeting the redistribution of land to landless farmers, farmworkers, and
tenants. Secure tenure rights to and control of land also mean access to the fundamental human rights to livelihood and food. Thus,
agrarian reform also emphasizes land ownership as a human right as enshrined in international treaties and policies, such as the UN
Declaration on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which the Philippines is a state
party (see FIAN Philippines, 2006). The Philippines itself enshrined the right of farmers to own the land they till in the 1987 Philippine
constitution, enunciating that the right to land is integral to the attainment of equity and social justice in Philippine society. Likewise,
secure land tenure reduces the vulnerability of disaster survivors. Typhoon Haiyan (locally known as Yolanda) exposed the vulnerabilities
of farmers without secure land tenure when some international humanitarian agencies refused to provide humanitarian aid to farmers
and informal settlers who were unable to show secure land property rights. The right to humanitarian assistance therefore requires that
the land-dependent rural poor have secure land property rights.
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. Agrarian reform was considered an essential component of the post-Marcos rural democratization
process. And the passage of CARP – in theory at least – took the initial step toward such a democratization process. In general, the program
mandated the distribution of all agricultural lands to landless farmers, farmworkers or tenants under the land-to-the-tiller principle of the
1987 constitution. CARP set a five-hectare landowner retention limit with an additional three hectares for every legitimate heir as preferred
beneficiaries. The goal is clear: to promote equity and social justice. Yet CARP is neither clearly revolutionary, because it does not call for the
expropriation of private land without compensating landlords or transferring land to farmers without charge, nor is it conservative, since it
does not merely target resettlements, but large, private landholdings. CARP is thus a liberal type of land reform that constitutes a
compromise between progressive reform advocates and reform opponents where state-led mechanisms such as compulsory acquisition
coexist with market-oriented options such as voluntary land transfer (VLT) options (Borras & Franco, 2005: 336ff.). There is no question,
however, that CARP is more progressive than earlier land reform programs. Its scope is comprehensive, covering private and public lands
regardless of crops (unlike under Presidential Decree no. 27’s focus on only rice and corn) or tenure arrangement. Millions of hectares of
previously excluded lands that were planted with coconut, sugarcane, rubber, banana, pineapple, and others were covered under CARP. The
government, through the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) and Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), initially
aimed to distribute 10.2 million hectares of private and public land to 4-5 million tenants, landless farmers, farmworkers, and occupants of
public land. This was adjusted to 8.1 million hectares and eventually to 7.9 million. The initial target of 10.2 million hectares was based on a
nationwide list of landowners called the Lista Saka (List of Farms), which was based on government tax records. Subsequent adjustments
were based on the so-called CARP Scope Validation,1 which supposedly entailed ground-level initiatives to further validate the scope of the
agrarian reform program. To what extent these validations defined actual areas to be subjected to agrarian reform is unclear. But the
reduction from the original target was significant and the DAR continues to entertain “new lands” for coverage, which means that the issue
of how much land is to be covered under agrarian reform remains uncertain 27 years after CARP took effect. The Land Bank of the Philippines
determines the value of the land using various factors that include the level of productivity, fair market value, the market value of adjacent
lots, and tax assessments, among others. Once the price is established, the landowner is paid by the Land Bank. A portion of the settlement
is paid in government bonds, while the rest is paid in cash. A 30-year amortization period allows less burdensome payments for farmer-
beneficiaries and gives them plenty of time to fully develop the land. In cases where the value of the land is beyond farmers’ capacity to pay,
the law provides an “affordability clause”, which bases the payment on the productivity of the awarded land (i.e. 2.5% of the gross harvest in
the first two years, 5% in the next three years and 10% in the remaining 25 years). Until today it is unclear if the affordability clause was
actually put into practice in the amortization process.
Support services are an integral component of CARP and a right of all farmer-beneficiaries. This is to ensure that the
beneficiaries will be able to make the land productive through access to technology, credit, and market services. In cases of
land disputes, farmers should also be provided with legal support to defend their land rights. In a compromise program,
however, landowning members of Congress had a significant influence on the law, creating several loopholes that allowed
landowners to evade, delay or derail land redistribution. These loopholes were reflected in anti-peasant and pro-landowner
provisions such as the stock distribution option (SDO) and leaseback agreements, VLT, the exclusion of fishponds and prawn
farms, and the exemption of reclassified land (land that was reclassified before CARP took effect in 1988) and areas utilized
for livestock production. Reclassified land is land that is specifically declared either by presidential proclamation or local
government units ordinance to be reserved or used for residential, commercial, and industrial purposes, among others. The
program also suffers from vague procedures for the identification of beneficiaries on commercial and corporate farms, the
prioritization of the distribution of public land over private landholdings, and unclear guidelines for land use conversions3
(Cruz & Manahan, 2014: 934; Tadem, 2015: 2). In particular, the SDO, leaseback agreements and VLT were major constraints
to land redistribution. The SDO is an option for corporate land to distribute stocks to farmworkers instead of land.4 Of 13
SDO cases, Hacienda Luisita, one of the largest and most controversial landholdings, which was previously owned by the
Cojuangcos, who are family of President Benigno Aquino III, is a prime example of the circumvention of land redistribution
under CARP (see FIAN International, n.d.). The VLT option was a much-favoured way to evade land redistribution. It allowed
landowners to transfer land directly to “dummy” beneficiaries, which ensured that the previous landowners maintained
control over the land. Despite its many loopholes, CARP paved the way for farmers’ land-rights claims. But with the various
loopholes and weak programme implementation it became necessary that claimants should be organised and capable of
opposing and resisting the anti-reform initiatives of actors opposed to CARP. As will be discussed below, there are cases
where farmers were successful in thwarting these anti-reform initiatives.
The DAR is the main agency tasked with redistributing private lands, while the DENR is tasked with distributing public lands.
The political will of the officials and employees of these agencies has directly influenced the pace of agrarian reform over
the 27 years of program implementation, and some administrations have performed better than others.