Filtered By: Topstories
News

How Noynoy can gain the moral high ground


If President-elect Noynoy Aquino wants to demonstrate that his new government represents generational change, he should convince his family to abandon efforts to hold onto Hacienda Luisita and finally allow it to be covered by the agrarian reform law. The expressed intention of Aquino to allow the distribution of land to farmworker-beneficiaries to be dragged out until some indeterminate moment before 2014, is simply the latest in a long line of efforts by the Aquino-Cojuangco family to avoid redistributing the land as mandated by the law. The longer Hacienda Luisita remains exempt from the land redistribution provisions of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law, the less credibility the new president’s government will have among the rural poor and the more vulnerable will be his government to charges of hypocrisy and the protection of family and elite interests and privileges by opponents of all political hues. During the election campaign, GMANews.TV published a series of reports on Hacienda Luisita by writer Stephanie Dychiu that drew from my book A Captive Land: The Politics of Agrarian Reform in the Philippines (Ateneo University Press, 1992) and a wide range of other sources to bring the story up to date. The well-researched series very accurately revealed uncomfortable truths that are difficult to accept, prompting efforts to suppress the story by those who do not want an airing of how elites in the country manipulate the law for their own ends. The series put under the microscope the historical record, which when closely examined, reveals that even so revered a figure as the late President Corazon Aquino acted in bad faith when it came to land reform and the family’s own land, Hacienda Luisita. The new president needs to preside over responsible closure of the episode of agrarian reform that began with Executive Order 229 in 1987. In my book, I argued in great detail why redistributive agrarian reform needs to be undertaken swiftly, ensuring compensation for land at something below market value, comprehensive in its scope and ensuring that those who receive land have access to the means to make it productive. For many reasons, also explained in my book, the CARL passed in 1988 fell far short of this mark. It opened the way for a long drawn-out process of reform that was costly to implement, allowed many loopholes whereby landowners could parcel up their land for their heirs, and had dubious impact on improving agricultural productivity. While many devoted activists, non-governmental organisations and diligent officials in the Department of Agrarian Reform have made the most of a weak law in seeing that some landless farmers received title to land and to improved livelihoods, it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that the long drawn-out programme has significantly dampened investment in agriculture, which by all rights should be a leading sector in the Philippine economy. I demonstrated in my book how those close to Cory Aquino during her campaign for the presidency had already designed a version of the corporate stock distribution program that eventually became so notorious in allowing the Aquino-Cojuangco family to avoid redistributing Hacienda Luisita to farmer and farmworker beneficiaries. I cited interviews with members of the family corporation who stated that family members were actively involved in drafting the stock distribution programme that eventually found its way into the law. I showed in great detail how the law allowed the family to undervalue the land and inflate the value of non-land assets to ensure that farmer beneficiaries would hold only a minority of shares in a company newly established for the purpose. In other words, this provision of the CARL was in fact designed by and for the Aquino-Cojuangco family and those large landowning families and companies, of which in the end there were very few, who might attempt to avoid the appropriation of their estates in this manner. One might excuse the family’s tenaciousness in ensuring their lands escaped redistribution if they had retained the land to become leaders in developing high value agricultural production, which could both feed urban markets in the Philippines and capture profitable niche markets abroad. However, this has not been the case. Instead, the family remained in sugar production, holding onto the land mainly for its value converted to non-agricultural uses. What is more they encumbered the corporation formed to include minority farmworker shareholders with huge debt in what can only be seen as a cynical strategy to deal with what was a troublesome continuing movement among farmworkers on the land to put into question the justice of the corporate stock distribution programme. The dubious character of the stock-distribution program as a provision of agrarian reform made Hacienda Luisita an ideal high-profile target where militant organisations could foment unrest and pursue their own political goals. But this was because the Aquino-Cojuangco family’s retention of the land violated, if not the legal provisions of the agrarian reform law, then the spirit of the law, which was said to be anchored in social justice. After the killings of workers in disputes over the land in 2005, the “Hacienda Luisita massacre", the family lost all moral authority to hold onto it. Given the poor record in managing the company in which land reform beneficiaries had a stake, the Department of Agrarian Reform was completely within the law in acting to revoke the corporate stock distribution provisions and order the land subject to redistribution. That the Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order to stop this and allowed it to stand for so long again illustrates the way law works in one way for the wealthy in the Philippines and another for those with few means and low social standing. The President-elect should bring an end to this sorry story swiftly. One of the central problems of CARL has been its long period of implementation. If the new President is to have any hope in successfully wrapping up this episode of reform, his government should move quickly. What better way to show its seriousness than for the new administration to allow the implementation of redistribution on the President’s family’s own land? By presiding over a government that redistributes the family’s landholding, a newly inaugurated President Aquino would be well-placed to bring land redistribution under CARL to an end by 2014. Delaying distribution of Hacienda Luisita until this deadline will cripple the government’s legitimacy to complete the programme on other private lands. It will provide an incentive to all private landowners to continue to play a waiting game expecting the government’s programme to run out of steam. By acting swiftly on CARL and on Hacienda Luisita, the new President could follow by ushering in new programmes to properly document landownership that could put it on a more solid footing, to provide incentives for those who will use the land productively to invest in it, to expand irrigation in sustainable ways (less than half of irrigable land in the country has been irrigated) and to promote modern agribusiness that could see agriculture take a much more prominent role as a growth sector in the country. So far, to this long-time observer of Philippine politics and economics, there is no sign that the President-elect or the people around him have any such plan. - GMANews.TV Dr. James Putzel is Professor of Development Studies at the London School of Economics. He wrote the landmark book on agrarian reform in the Philippines, 'A Captive Land.'

LOADING CONTENT