Land Reform under Marcos Ferdinand Marcos sometimes liked to call the New Society, “a revolution from above”, but those “below” had difficulty in discovering the “revolutionary” content. He also called land reform the “cornerstone” of the New Society, even adding “If land reform fails, there is no New Society” (PDE, 22 Sept. 1973). In the end it was too accurate a prediction. Presidential Decree (P.D.) No. 27 was the most sweeping land reform document that the Philippines had ever seen. It subjected to government purchase and resale to tenant occupants all tenanted rice and corn lands of more than 7 hectares. Compensation, for the first time, was not to be based on the market price, but was to be equivalent to 2 1/2 times the annual harvest, the Taiwanese and Vietnamese formula. This initiative was motivated by a special complex of factors. Primary was the desire to undermine the strength of landed elites that had provided troublesome opposition before martial law. Aquino family land was among the first to be seized — and not just because it was in the “A’s”. Sergio Osmelia, Jr., of Cebu, who had opposed Marcos In the 1969 elections, owned extensive corn land. (Marcos’ opposition among sugar and coconut planters was dealt with somewhat later in another fashion, through marketing monopolies. There was clearly an advantage in confronting different elites at different times.) “Operation Land Transfer” of the Department of Agrarian Reform started to cover large estates first, and, in fact, never finished the category below 24 has. It appears that the presidential disinterest in the programme after the first few years was related to the fact that his primary goal had already been accomplished. Land reform was also sold in Washington as a justification for the imposition of authoritarian rule. Marcos advisors were careful students of Huntington. This justification was based on the assumption that armed—as well as unarmed-agrarian unrest since 1970 revealed intense dissatisfaction with land tenure arrangements in some segments of the peasantry and that it could only be met effectively by executive decree. But unrest had been concentrated in Central Luzon, so that is where land reform efforts were concentrated as well. Reform, which included a crash programme to organize village cooperatives, was thus a way to win peasant support and place it within malleable organizations at the same time that revolutionary mass movements were being forcibly crushed. The two-pronged attack was apparently successful in the short run in destroying the “threat”. Marcos succeeded as well in building a longer term political base in those Central Luzon provinces where the policy was most fully implemented. Nueva Ecija, which had perhaps the most mobilized peasantry, received the most attention. It had the largest U.S. aid project, was the site of the first Cooperative Bank, the first Area Marketing Cooperative, etc., etc. More than a decade after the reform had been implemented there, Ben Kerkvliet found that land reform beneficiaries voted for Marcos in gratitude-and because they had been persuaded that the election of Mrs. Aquino might invalidate P.D. 27. (Landless laborers, on the other hand, were more likely to support Aquino; they had received no benefit from Marcos reform). In other regions, where implementation had been flawed and incomplete, the reform itself contributed to agrarian unrest-raising and then dashing hopes-and so to the rise of the NPA, even in provinces which had never before seen a revolutionary movement. The imposition of martial law ended open, legitimate interest group activity, except for coopted organizations. The Federation of Free Farmers, which had launched such a sophisticated and effective lobbying effort for land reform in 1971, was reduced to near impotence, even though it was often invited to participate in inconclusive government consultations on policy and its implementation. Other farmers’ organizations affiliated to the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) or the Department of Agriculture were more cheering squads than pressure groups, in the corporatist style, even though their leaders were capable of very cogent critiques of policy problems. The central institution necessary for reform, DAR, was already in existence prior to martial law, though under P.D. 27 it was substantially expanded. (Nevertheless pay and equipment was mostly inferior to other line departments, making for poor morale.) Secretary Conrado Estrella, formerly the governor of Pangasinan,had easy access to President Marcos, though after 1974 this seldom produced a major decision. Estrella did not lose favor — in the late ’70s he became regional coordinator for Central Luzon of the government political party, Kilusang Bangong Lipunan (KBL), and member of the party executive-but the president had lost Interest in agrarian policy. Estrella was himself a landlord, and had many friends in the same category. Rumors were rampant in the Department about the special deals these friends could strike, softening the impact of the law. Nor were landlords loath to approach DAR officials at the provincial and district level; in one town the DAR office was located on the veranda of the spacious residence of the largest landlord. While some DAR officials were harassed by landlords, and their lawyers, because of their honesty, others were rewarded for “cooperativeness”. In thousands of cases officials simply “overlooked” the existence of tenanted estates. Perhaps the landlord’s greatest advantage was the Department’s reluctance to implement P.D. 27’s provision for Barrio Committees for Land Productivity, composed of four tenants, two owner-cultivators and two landlords as well as a few local officials. These Committees were supposed to examine the records and establish land productivity, which would determine the price. They might have been used more generally to supervise village level implementation. But landlords found initially that these committees produced a finding that resulted in a land price less than the market rate, and so they subsequently refused to come to meetings. DAR usually was reluctant to push for a decision without landlord representatives and instead allowed the extra-legal practice of price negotiation, in which local DAR officials often played a corrupt role. The land price nearly doubled as a result. The one institution which might have allowed substantial peasant input into the implementation process had been deactivated by landlord intransigence (see Wurfel, 1977: 13-14). In this context, with incentives as well as deterrents to reform, what was accomplished by the “Land to the Tiller” programme under P.D. 27 in the little more than 13 years that Marcos had to supervise its implementation? The Operation Land Transfer (OLT) target varied in different reports in the early years, but by 1976 had settled on about a half-million tenants on about 750,000 has. of tenanted rice and corn land held by owners with more than 7 has. (This was only half of the tenants on tenanted rice and corn land according to DAR’s 1972 announcement.) (See Wurfel: 1977, 6-7.) As of the end of 1984 DAR (which had become a Ministry, or MAR) reported that 440,239 tenants had received Certificates of Land Transfer (ClTs) covering 755,172 has., or in excess of target. This Certificate merely identified the parcel of land which the tenant farmed, to which, under P.D. 27, he had a future right to secure ownership, pending completion of landlord compensation and cultivator repayment. MAR, and USAID, however, were passing off the ClT as land title in press conferences in Manila and congressional testimony in Washington. In any case, a large percentage (perhaps more than half) of ClTs described in official reports as “Issued” had never actually been received by the tenant farmer (Harkin, 1982: 11-12). The remainder sat in some MAR office either as a result of bureaucratic error, corrupt deal, or sloth, or because landlords had posed some objection, which usually took years to investigate. The actual number of “Emancipation Patents”, or land titles, produced by December 1984 were 164,881 for 120,702 tenants, or less than 25% of the originally accounted scope of the programme. There had been continued growth in this category In the 1980s and by January 1986 180,656 patents had been issued to 132,106 beneficiaries. But even the issuance of patents was not a sure indication of the longer term impact of the reform, since the cumulative rate of payment on amortizations was less than 20%. To summarize the impact over 13 years we must note that 75% of expected beneficiaries, either because of bureaucratic ennui or landlord evasion (legal or illegal), had not become owner cultivators. Many of those had In the meantime lost the chance by selling (illegally) their CLTs. Furthermore, because landless laborers had never benefited from the reform and because population continued to grow, pressure on the land was intense; even the 25% of tenants who were supposed to have received “emancipation patents” did not necessarily remain owner-cultivators. Many-especially if they lived near towns-had taken on urban occupations and accepted share-tenants at traditional rates to farm their land. The pattern of Philippine land reform since the ear1y 1900s was at work: the removal of big landlords to be replaced by small ones. Nevertheless there had been some reduction in rural Inequity. And despite — or perhaps because of — the failures and inadequacies of the past, by 1986 the demand for the broadening and intensification of land reform was greater than ever before, both by peasants and their middle class spokespersons.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 09:46:06 +0000
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