People's Recovery, Empowerment and
Development Assistance Foundation, Inc.

Anyone looking to divine the country's future direction from the reading of anniversaries would have had plenty of eerie significance to mine during the 12th birthday of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program last June 10.

The date also marked the 65th birthday of business tycoon Eduardo "Danding " Cojuanco, whose alternative "corporative" scheme for his Becloud estates in 1998 earned for him the "godfather of land reform " sobriquet from President Estrada, but also who called it the final betrayal of the agrarian reform law.

CARP was commemorated last week at the Cuisine Memorial Circle in front of the Agrarian Reform Offices with the usual frenzied protests from farmers and their supporters, and irritated inconvenienced commuters.

Farmers' groups declared the landmark social justice program adrift, with victory nowhere in sight .

Agrarian reform is being undone and prevented from being realized, particularly in the past two years of the Estrada aministration, through a system of subterfuge designed to favor the landowners, they said.

Far from going forward, land reform was being reversed with cancellation of emancipation patents and land ownership awards, land use conversion and exemptions from CARP being the order of the day.

Instead of distributing private land, the DAR was offering the farmer Cojuangco's corporative joint venture model which would revert them back to the status of tenants and serfs.

The message was compelling but the reality is far more complicated.

Despite the militant Bagong Alyansang makabayan's confident declaration that the peasants were "ready to take up arms and fight for genuine agrarian reform," peasant unrest is waning. The communist rebels who have been the agrarian reform movement is at a loss for new political patronage. The President was himself in Bacolod paying his respects to the "landlords of the landlords," as farmers' groups have taken to calling Cojuangco.

A specially pessimistic assessment came from Romeo Royandoyan, executive director of the Philippine Peasant Institute, a non-governmental organization that conducts research on agrarian reform issues. He said few outside the NGO community seem to care anymore about CARP.

"To the general public, CARP is irrelevant in this electronic age," Royandoyan said.

The case could indeed be made for the agrarian reform issue having gone anyway.

Land reform policies were instituted to defuse peasant rebellions and guerrilla actions that were the most destabilizing factors in the 1950s and 1960s. The first land reform law was introduce by decree, PD 27, by the martial law regime of President Marcos in 1972, proof even dictators realize that total expression is not the answer.

Initially limited to rice and corn lands and settlement areas, PD 27 gave very few concessions. If the farmers proved intractable, there was always the Army and Police.

In 1988, a reform-minded government set out to transform centuries-old unjust structures and systems of land tenure and use. The CARP law expanded land reform coverage to all kinds of land, including in its scope lands in the public domain and the 14.4 million indigenous people living upland regions. CARP envisioned a nation of small, family-size farms owned and cultivated by their owners. The program would be well-fund from the confiscated loot of the Marcos cronies.

Twleve years after CARP, the bulk of the land remained with the landowners who, if they can not squeeze through the loopholes in the law, have other stratagems at their command.

According to PPI, DAR has barely succeeded in distributed 60 percent of its target, and some of these have been eroded by a disturbing trend in canceling of emancipation patents and land ownership certificates. (See related story)

Royandayon says that DAR's own records show that distribution of private agricultural lands is down by 12 percent from 102,000 hectares in 1998 to 90,000 hectares in 1999. The compulsory acquisition of private agricultural land also declined by 7 percent from 1998 to 1999.

PPI researchers in Negros Oriental have uncovered the duplicity, confusion and confrontations in the continuing conflict between landowners and landless in the rural areas.

Farmers' groups point out to a more systematic pro-landlord bias developing in the past years, however.

Aside from the "cooperative" scheme of Cojuangco that the DAR has adopted, DAR has been reportedly offering "swap deals," approving conversations and granting exemptions to accommodate friends and cronies of the administration.

Through swap deals, DAR will supposedly allow conversions of prime agricultural land to residential or commercial use if a replacement is found.

The government is also reportedly mulling changes in the ownership retention limits from the allowable 5 hectares to 16,000 hectares, again to accommodate crony interests.

Defenders of DAR, however, point out that while the country's farmers are looked on to the past promise of land reform, new technocratic leaders are focused on the overwhelming challenge of the country's bid to join the global market economy.

The Ramos government introduced in 1997 the agrarian reform communities program, a scheme to turn rural areas into key productivity centers, or "centers of sustainable rural development," in DAR-speak. Funded by $50 million from the World Bank, the program brings together several barangays of CARP beneficiaries so they can be primed to receive the basic infrastructure and support services so essential to transforming them into self-sustaining, productive communities.

A recent World Bank review of the ARC program said it has been successful in bringing about significant improvement s in productivity, income and human capital in rural areas.

Owing perhaps to his former incarnation as a leader of the communist-led national Democratic Front, DAR Secretary Horacio Morales is seen as a genuine social reformer. Farmers' groups see him as more of a counter-reformer, however.

Despite his background, Morales appears to favor nothing more radical than a rational and commercial Philippine agriculture, free of feudal characteristics.

he has expanded on the ARC strategy, proposing to turn redistributed farms into communities with strong cooperatives capable of managing agri-business enterprises and able to attract high-impact investments.

Morales has also adopted a new strategy for plantations covered by CARP, opting not to subdivide them because it would very unprofitable. Hence,DAR's adoption of Cojuangco's cooperative joint venture model which has placed Morales in the farmers' bad books.

If the economic solutions advanced by Morales succeed, a long-term transition away form the old agrarian reform would indeed be under way, no doubt attended by festering reserves of ill-will.

Whether by design, the CARP having been drafted after all by landowners or their agents, farmers' energies have been redirected away from violence into the endless carping that culminate in the yearly CARP anniversary protests

LEAH P. MAKABENTA

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