New Land Reform Alliance Rises in Negros
‘Better to have struggled and lost than not to have struggled at all’

Driven by the idea of agrarian justice, farmers and farmhands in Negros have formed a new umbrella organization, the Negros Coordinating Council for Genuine Land Reform (NCC-GLR).   Peasant leaders view the federation as a consensual body that will start and push a massive campaign for genuine land reform in the island. 

By Hannah A. Papasin
Bulatlat.com

The tension is so thick you can almost slice it with a meat cleaver.  A throng of men and women toting placards faces a phalanx of armed guards of the hacienda house.  Amid orders to disperse, they refuse to budge.  Their faces are grimly etched in a mix of emotions:  fear, indignation, and anxiety.  But they stay their ground, silently defiant.

Behind their determined gaze and a glimmer of hope in their eyes is a deep-seated hunger for the land they till.  Government officials assure them they will get their land despite opposition from the landowner.  But they know better.  The haciendero is lord and his words are often the law itself.  Like their skin scorched dark-brown by the sun, their hopes have all too often been burnt by false government promises.

But the grave, uneasy silence does not last long.  A shot rings out…then some more.  A melee breaks loose.  Men and women scamper to safety.  Somewhere, in the distance, is the piercing cry of a child, soon drowned out by bitter, haunting sounds of wailing.  Angry shouts and curses follow, but in the end it is the cries of anguish that prevail. 

As the panic clears, in the midst of a gathering crowd is the lifeless body of a stocky-broad shouldered man in his early 30’s, his farmer’s hand calloused by years of deftly wielding a machete in sugar fields, and still clutching a stone meant to stop the hail of bullets fired by elements of the Regional Mobile Group of the Philippine National Police. 

This is Negros, land of sugar and sacadas (seasonal migrant sugarcane cutters).  In this island of central Philippines, large sugar estates and centrals owned by many of the country’s richest elite families are hotbeds of abject poverty and social unrest.

Welcome to the Philippines, social volcano, land of social extremes.

Such a scene of hacienda terror and dangerous farmer protest is typical in Negros’ sugar estates.

Land hunger in Negros

Studies show that of the total 532,180 hectares of sugar lands in the Philippines, 78.8 percent of these are concentrated in the hands of only four percent of the population. 

With its lopsided land distribution, Negros has stood out as among the country’s major flashpoints of agrarian disputes and land reform.  Here in the island, former Marcos crony Eduardo Cojuangco, launched his corporative scheme, under which tenants are offered shares of corporations instead of land titles.  Cojuangco’s media handlers have packaged him as the country’s “land reform godfather” and his scheme as government’s new land reform formula. 

Political observers have feared Cojuangco to have recently struck a deal with President Macapagal-Arroyo to drop a presidential bid and to pledge to support Arroyo’s candidacy in exchange for maintaining control over San Miguel Corporation, the country’s largest manufacturing firm.

This scheme favored by the country’s biggest landlords is nearly identical to the stratagem adopted by Cojuangco’s cousin, former President Cory Aquino, to retain control over the 8,000-hectare Hacienda Luisita under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), the Philippine government land reform plan. Luisita is some 70 kms north of Manila in the heart of Tarlac province.

Peasant groups have since condemned this corporative model of Cojuangco as a deceptive ploy to perpetuate peasants’ lack of control over their land.  The struggle for control over the land between a dominant aristocracy that includes Cojuangco and a poor peasantry continues to shape the changing power configuration in Negros island.

A new organization

Driven by the idea of agrarian justice, farmers and farmhands in Negros have formed a new umbrella organization, the Negros Coordinating Council for Genuine Land Reform (NCC-GLR).   Peasant leaders view the federation as a consensual body that will start and push a massive campaign for genuine land reform in the island. 

“We have seen that there is a need for individuals, institutions and organizations to band together and campaign for genuine land reform,” Roy Mahinay, National Federation of Sugarworkers-Negros chairman and one of the NCC-GLR’s convenors said last week.  “Historically, individual undertakings in the struggle for land are vulnerable to manipulations and machinations of those in power, thus the need to pool together resources, strengths and efforts for a more effective campaign.” 

At the core of the NCC-GLR are a council of leaders recommended by its member organizations, a coordinating council, a working secretariat and the working committees.

Sister Aquila Sy of the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines (RMP) is the alliance’s chairperson, and Fr. Gordoncillo, its over-all coordinator.

The NCC-GLR has lined up as among its tasks for genuine agrarian reform:

• conduct education and information drives on the concept and need for genuine agrarian reform,

• undertake efforts, including lobbies, to pressure government, both local and national, not only to fast-track the implementation of CARP but also to provide installed beneficiaries support services and subsidies to ensure productivity, as well as provide protection from all attempts and threats to take back what has been awarded;

• expose and oppose all moves by the government and the ruling elite to thwart genuine agrarian reform and further weaken CARP through schemes that allow landowners to retain control or ownership of the land like cancellation of Certificates of Land Ownership Award, land conversions, the corporative scheme and the memorandum of agreement that is being pushed by the administration of Negros Occidental Gov. Joseph Marañon;

• engage in concerted efforts to support individual initiatives – whether mass actions, negotiations or legal actions – toward meeting the minimum- to medium-term goals of genuine agrarian reform such as rent reduction, increased wages and benefit for farm workers and sharing for tenants, and farm lots;

• undertake campaigns and other efforts to support the basic sectors, particularly the peasants and farmworkers, in various areas such as health, culture and education.

Broad unity

As a force for broad-based solidarity, the NCC-GLR was able to harness the support of the diocese of the Catholic Church through its Social Action Center director Fr. Aniceto Buenafe.

The impressive turnout of participants during the NCC-GLR’s official launching last Sept. 27 at the Scala Retreat House nurtures high hopes for the long-term success of NCC-GLR.

Delegates from all over Negros – some from peasant organizations, others from churches like the Philippine Independent Church and a representative from the landlord class  – traveled to Bacolod to listen to the agrarian justice message of the NCC-GLR convenors.

Organizations with track record of support to the peasant struggle for land attended:  the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan), the party-list Bayan Muna, the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), Anakbayan, Gabriela, the Paghiliusa sa Paghidaet Development Group (PDG), the fisherfolk organization Pamalakaya, and the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines.

All member groups have their own idea of how to go about with the struggle that have been started centuries ago, Fr. Gordoncillo said.

“We are not latching our hopes on the land reform program of the government, which has since degenerated into a farce,” added NCC-GLR executive director and NCC-GLR co-convenor and lawyer Ben Ramos.

Still, Ramos said, that does not mean that the NCC-GLR would not exploit the opportunities made available by law in the pursuit of its goals and objectives.

Feudalism in Negros

The statistics on peasant conditions in Negros that NCC-GLR aims to address remain grim and depressing.

Consider, for instance, that an average sugar farmhand in Negros receives P60 – or several times below the daily minimum wage - for a day’s work of weeding the canefields; P75 per ton of cane cut and loaded in a truck, and P308.55 for every 10,000 canepoints planted.

Most hacienda laborers take home only P20 to P80 a day, a condition worsened by the pakyaw system (the piece-rate system that pegs pay to the output).

Even worse off is child labor, which grows from the need of the poor to maximize income-earning opportunities by having children spend time in farm work what they would otherwise devote to play or study.   Figures showed a dramatic rise in the number of women employed in the plantations, as roughly 50 percent of the total workforce in sugar haciendas are women and children.

And then there is the fact that gender discrimination remains pervasive.  Women and children receive less than what men do, with women getting only 50 percent of the pay received by men, and children receiving only a quarter of those for adult males.

A rapid appraisal of Negros also shows that a similarly deplorable level of poverty affect the poor fisherfolk, who are also hit hard by privatization of uplands and coastal areas in the island.

“The feudal structure in the countryside is really disgusting,” Barreta said, as he stressed the need for “just and equitable distribution of land and its resources” by means of production.

Without the “just and equitable distribution of land,” he said, “true peace could not exist.”

“But since the land reform laws are crafted by members of the ruling elite and designed to protect their interests, it would be foolish if we depend on these laws to serve the interests of the marginalized,” Barreta said.

A shared dream

The assembly discussions stressed that the council members share one dream:  that the peasants and farmers, whose “blood, sweat and tears help sweeten sugar” and “who mold history and chart the destiny of a nation” – finally own the land that they have been tilling for years.

In his speech during the assembly Gordoncillo summed up delegates’ hopes:  “Our ancestors have been struggling for land for centuries.  And we are continuing that struggle.  I hope none of us here has given up hope.” 

“We should not give up hope,” he said, adding, “It would be better to have struggled and lost than not to have struggled at all.” Bulatlat.com

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