carp

Among other provisions, the CARPER bill mandates that private agricultural lands – the type that the Arroyos and the Cojuangcos own – can only be distributed if the original CARP managed to distribute 90 percent of its target. But CARP, despite the two decades it had, only distributed less than half of it. It’s an impossible provision that only underscores what progressive farmers have been saying all along – that CARPER is bogus.
MANILA – It seemed incongruous, the sight of farmers marching toward Mendiola, carrying placards and chanting angry words against the extension of a law that purports to emancipate them from the bondage of the land.
But to the farmers belonging to the KilusangMagbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), who marched in Manila last week but were met with water cannons from the police even before they could set foot on the historic bridge where many of them had died fighting for land reform, the passage on June 3 of House Resolution 4077 was as much a cause for indignation as the landlessness that prevails in the countryside.
HR 4077, or the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms (CARPER) bill, extends for another five years the 20-year-old Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.
As far as the farmers are concerned, the CARPER bill, far from solving the problems of farmers, will be even worse than the original CARP.
In an interview, Anakpawis Representative and KMP chairman Rafael Mariano said certain provisions in the CARPER bill will aggravate the farmers’ fundamental problem of landlessness and will only strengthen the land monopoly of a few.
“A Congress that represents the class interest of landlords and big local and foreign corporations can, unsurprisingly, railroad an ultimately anti-farmer legislation like the CARP extension bill,” Mariano said.
Under the bill, the landholdings of the Arroyos, the Cojuangcos and other landlords will remain untouched. He believes that, precisely for this reason, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo issued the marching orders to her allies in Congress to pass the bill. “She certified it as urgent,” Mariano said.
Three Phases
Lands covered by CARPER will be acquired and distributed in three phases.
Phase One will cover rice and corn lands, all idle lands or abandoned lands, all private lands voluntarily offered by the owners for agrarian reform, all lands foreclosed by government financial institutions, all lands acquired by the Presidential Commission on Good Government, and all other lands owned by government devoted to or suitable for agriculture.
Phase Two of the program will cover all alienable and disposable public agricultural lands; all arable public agricultural lands under agro-forest, pasture and agricultural leases already cultivated and planted to crops in accordance with Section 6 Article XIII of the Constitution; all public agricultural lands that are to be opened for new development and resettlement; all private agricultural lands in excess of 50 hectares.
Phase Three will cover all other private agricultural lands starting with large landholdings and then those with medium and small landholding.
Mariano said that under CARPER, private agricultural lands can only be covered by the law and distributed to farmers if 90 percent of all the land classified for distribution under the original CARP and Phase One and Phase Two of CARPER had been distributed. In other words, before CARPER can implement Phase Three, which is the most problematic phase, the original CARP must have distributed 90 percent of its target and, if it did not, CARPER’s Phase One and Phase Two must make up for the shortfall — within the period of five years.
This, Mariano said, is next to impossible and is the biggest defect of CARPER.
Mariano said that the original CARP failed — despite running for more than two decades — to achieve even half of its target, let alone 90 percent. “When will that happen?” Mariano asked. “In effect, no private agricultural lands will ever be distributed under the CARP extension.”
CARPER, he said, is designed to fail.
According to data from Mariano’s group, CARP managed to cover only 43 percent of all agricultural lands in the country in those 20 years. How can the CARPER, Mariano asked, improve that distribution to 90 percent in just five years? Mariano asked.
Based on the 2008 accomplishment report of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), which covers the implementation of two agrarian reform programs — Presidential Decree No. 27 of former President Marcos and the CARP — 3. 8 million hectares of land have been acquired and distributed by the DAR and another 2.4 million hectares distributed through the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).
Of these, however, government data show that only 1.9 million hectares of private agricultural land has been distributed since 1988. And KMP said that 82 percent of these private agricultural land still have pending cases and that no actual or physical land distribution took place.
Under CARP, the scope for land distribution had been eroded from time to time. From the original 10.3 million hectares in 1988, the scope was cut down by 21.76 percent to 8.1 million hectares in 1995. The revisions resulted from executive issuances, administrative orders, Supreme Court rulings, and amendments to the law.
No Expansion of Coverage
Mariano said that the progressive party-list bloc in Congress proposed amendments to the bill during the second reading but the sponsors and the majority flatly rejected their proposals.
“We were pushing for a more encompassing coverage of the land reform program. Specifically, we wanted to delete provisions that exempted agricultural lands for CARP coverage, but they rejected it,” Mariano said.
Agricultural lands exempted and excluded from CARP coverage include lands used for parks, wildlife, forest reserves, reforestation, fish sanctuaries and breeding grounds, watershed and mangroves; private lands actually, directly and exclusively used for prawn farms and fishponds; and lands actually, directly and exclusively used and found to be necessary for national defense, school sites and campuses and all lands with 18 percent slope and over.
Mariano said that instead of expanding the coverage of land reform program, the landlords/legislators in Congress added provisions that will exempt more agricultural land from coverage to include land devoted to aquaculture, livestock, swine raising and the like.
Under CARPER, landowners will have cause to file more petitions for exemptions before the DAR.
CARP allows multinational corporations to maintain their control and operation of vast tracts of agricultural lands through lease, management, grower or service contracts for a period of 25 years and renewable for another 25 years. This provision allowed transnational corporations such as Dole and Del Monte to control 220,000 hectares of agricultural lands devoted for export crops.
During the second reading, Mariano proposed the distribution of land controlled and leased by multinational corporations – in effect the deletion of this provision that favors foreign companies. He was ignored — CARPER will retain this same provision.
Land-Use Conversion
Mariano said Anakpawis, together with Bayan Muna, Gabriela Women’s Party and Kabataan, also proposed the deletion of Section 65 of the bill regarding the conversion of lands already awarded to farmers.
It said that after five years from the land’s award, “when the land ceases to be economically feasible and sound for agricultural purposes, or the locality has become urbanized and the land will have greater economic value for residential, commercial or industrial purposes,” the DAR, upon the application of the beneficiary or the landowner and with due notice to the present landowner, may reclassify or convert the land and dispose it.
Mariano said the retention of this provision from the original law will pave the way for more cases of land-use conversion. The conversion of land to other uses is one of the methods used by landowners to go around CARP.
DAR records show that in the first seven years of CARP, an estimated 33,707 hectares of agricultural lands were converted into other uses. By the end of 1997, conversion has covered 59, 965 hectares of agricultural lands.
The report of the National Statistics Office is more telling. In 2002, the NSO reported that 827, 892 hectares of lands have been converted to other uses.
Non-Land Transfer Schemes
Mariano also proposed the deletion of the so-called non-land transfer schemes in the definition of agrarian reform as stated in Section 3 of the bill.
CARP gives option to landowners to choose “all other arrangements alternative to the physical distribution of lands, such as production or profit-sharing, labor administration, and distribution of shares of stocks which will allow beneficiaries to receive a just share of the fruits of the lands they work.”
The KMP has determined that this provision undermines the intent of any agrarian-reform program.
He said this very provision was used by the Cojuangcos of Tarlac to spare the nearly 6,500 hectares of Hacienda Luisita from land distribution. Instead of actual land distribution, the farmers were given shares of the company under the stock-distribution option. But far from making the farmers instant millionaires, the stock options instead denied the farmers and farmworkers from owning a piece of the Hacienda Luisita lands that they have been tilling for more than five decades. This is precisely the kind of feudal setup that a genuine agrarian reform program ought to break.
On the island of Negros, other stock-option and joint-venture schemes by Eduardo Cojuangco are prevalent, particularly in Pontevedra, La Carlota City, La Castellana and Himamaylan City.
New Form of Feudal Exploitation
Landlords who did give up their land “profited immensely” from the implementation of CARP, a study by the Sentro Para saTunaynaRepormangAgraryo found out.
Citing data from the Land Bank of the Philippines, the study revealed that from 1972 to 2005, the compensation to 83,203 landowners for 1,348,758 hectares reached P41.6 billion in cash and bonds, or an average of P 500,463 per landlord. In 2005, P4.6 billion went to the compensation of landlords.
The staggering payments to landlords can be traced partly to the practice by landlords to go to the courts to seek “just compensation” whenever they are not satisfied with the valuation by the DAR and Land Bank of the Philippines of their property.
On the other hand, supposed beneficiaries ended up with the short end of the stick. Mariano said that CARPER will result in more cancellations of certificate of land transfer (CLTs), certificate of land ownership awards (CLOAs) and emancipation patents (EPs) as farmer-beneficiaries would be unable to pay for land amortization.
He said that, on average, the cost of agricultural lands is pegged at P235,00 per hectare. “With six percent interest and land tax, farmers would find it hard to pay for amortization,” Mariano said.
He called land amortization as a new form of feudal exploitation. “Amortization constantly increases,” he said. Mariano said that if a farmer failed to pay three annual amortizations, his land is foreclosed and will most likely end up in the hands of rich landowners. This leads, he said, to the reconcentration of land to the few landlords.
In fact, the DAR reported in 2007 that 5,049 EPs and 103,092 CLOAs were already canceled involving 204,579 hectares of land. The figure does not include pending cases of cancellation.
The DAR figures are way below the results of the study of independent think tank Ibon Foundation that said that by the middle of 2004 alone, more than 2,000 EPs and CLOAs covering 380,000 hectares of land were canceled.
Worse Provisions
Mariano said he expects a worse version of CARPER at the bicameral conference. “I am certain that landlord-legislators will want to insert more anti-farmer provisions,” he said.
The Senate already passed on third reading Senate Bill (SB) 2666 or “An Act Strengthening CARP.” In a statement, Ibon described the bill as worse than the original version as it represents a concession to big private landed interests.
“The bill, for instance, allows previous landowners to reacquire and reconsolidate their landholdings after the 10-year retention period,” Ibon said.
Ibon said the bill reduced the CARP into real-estate transaction as it retains non-land transfer schemes like the SDO. Also retained is the provision for voluntary land transfers that requires farm workers and small farmers to pay spot cash to the landowners at market value – an impossible imposition on poor farmers who can hardly even make ends meet.
The Senate version also only targets distribution of lands to only 400,000 farmer-beneficiaries even as there are still 1.6 million farmers awaiting land reform, excluding the millions still awaiting land awarded them and those whose lands have been sequestered due to indebtedness.
Ibon added that even as SB 2666 retains compulsory land acquisition and distribution (LAD) component, it also upholds the same provisions that allow landowners to skirt around CARP coverage.
Resistance
Mariano said they will continue to demand the junking of the CARP extension.
The farmers led by KMP will hound with protests every step leading to the ratification of CARPER as they continue to push for the passage of a genuine agrarian reform bill.
“Free distribution of land should be the central characteristic of a truly social justice measure,” Mariano said.In the meantime, Mariano said the peasants have to continue relying on themselves in the struggle for genuine land reform in the countryside.