manilamail/archive/jul2013/13jul21.html POSTSCRIPT/ PhilSTAR/ July 21, 2013/ Sunday By Federico D. Pascual Jr. Has Noy a solution to Luisita problem? LUISITA PARCELS: Agrarian reform beneficiaries of Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac have not received the titles to their parcels to be taken from the sugar estate but some of them are already talking of selling their would-be farms. We cannot blame them. By itself, plain land distribution or the parceling out of big plantations into small family farms dooms both the agrarian reform program and its beneficiaries. With more than 6,100 workers sharing Luisita’s 4,100 hectares, each beneficiary will end up with around 6,700 square meters that the Department of Agrarian Reform will raffle to them. Many workers have expressed fear that the family lot, whose location and soil type they do not know until it is given to them, may not be able to pay for the household’s reasonable needs, including food, medical and schooling expenses. * * * PROBLEM: A foreshadowing of the looming Luisita problem was given by businessman-sportsman Jose “Peping” Cojuangco Jr. in the Balitaan last Friday of the Capampangan in Media Inc. (CAMI) at its Bale Balita (House of News) in the Clark Freeport in Pampanga. The uncle of President Noynoy Aquino said he is not against land reform per se, but is worried that it is not being carried out to achieve its goals of improving the life of farm workers and shifting capital from large agricultural lands to industry. Cojuangco noted that while other countries, the closest example being Taiwan, consolidate small farms into bigger plantations to achieve economic scale, the Philippines moves in the opposite direction by breaking up big haciendas into uneconomic family farms. * * * LAND NOT FREE: Aside from the parcels being too small to support a family’s economic needs, Cojuangco warned that the land does not have uniform type and fertility. He said: “Some areas are sandy, some are dry, some get flooded, some have no irrigation, some are populated with little agricultural space, some are less populated with big agricultural space.” He also pointed out that agrarian reform beneficiaries will not get the land for free. They will have to pay the Land Bank for it. In the stock option that the hacienda had offered (but which the Supreme Court had ruled out), the workers were to be given shares of stock for free and continue to receive wages while enjoying welfare, medical, educational and other benefits. * * * GOV’T HELP: Cojuangco said a survey would show that more than half of plantations in the country that had been distributed to tenants never saw the improvement of the lives of the beneficiaries. Many of them had sold their lots or lost them to creditors. If Cojuangco foresaw land reform failing to achieve its social and economic objectives, what could be done to salvage it? He suggested the implementation of the law he sponsored years ago as a congressman for the setting up of Agrarian Reform Communities under which family parcels were grouped into economic-size farms, then pumped with government assistance. Government help would include farm inputs, post-harvest and drying facilities, efficient mills, warehousing and a marketing network. * * * LET’S DO IT!: Why does not he suggest this integrated program to his 53-year-old nephew the President, who after all has seen for himself the realities of farm life in Luisita? “I don’t have the ear of the President,” Cojuangco, who turns 79 this September, said with an enigmatic smile. President Aquino has said that he had divested from the family corporation that owned Luisita and that he was leaving it to the DAR and appropriate agencies to do what is right. Will the President surprise everybody tomorrow in his State of the Nation Address by announcing a comprehensive program to assist organized agrarian reform beneficiaries not only in Luisita but in all similarly situated estates? Go for it, Sir! * * * EXTORT TRY: Also in his SONA, we are awaiting the President’s report on what he had done with the crooks infesting the Department on Transportation and Communication since the time of Secretary Mar Roxas II. Czech ambassador Josef Rychtar had written to the President that in July last year some DoTC officials met executives of Czech firm Inekon accompanied by the envoy and demanded a $30-million bribe that was later lowered to $2.5 million. When the Czechs refused to come across, the ambassador said, their firm which was bidding to supply coaches for the MRT-3 system was blacklisted. (Abaya has denied that Inekon was blacklisted.) * * * OFFICIALS NAMED: The ambassador said those in the meeting included Perpetuo “Juju” Lotilla, Rene “Timmy” Limcaoco, Catherine Gonzales and Jaime “Jim” Feliciano, all of whom were brought into the department by Roxas and are still holding key posts. The envoy also wrote: “I wish to state that the allegations that members of your family were involved with discussions with Inekon on any projects in the Philippines are simply untrue and malicious. “(No) member of your family has offered their assistance in any of the projects that my country is pursuing in the Philippines. Your family is well known not to involve themselves on governmental affairs, most especially in the area of procurement.” * * * BLACK PROP: Rychtar was clarifying rumors that the President’s sister Ballsy and her husband Eldon were with a group that had tried to extort a bribe from Inekon. As early as June 30, we wrote in Postscript: “I do not believe the black propaganda that presidential eldest sister Ballsy Aquino-Cruz had tried extorting a bribe from a Czech company interested in a contract to supply coaches for a Metro Manila light rail line. “To me, having known this prim and proper daughter of Ninoy and Cory Aquino, it would be out of character for her to demand a bribe from a would-be contractor and thereby ruin the name that the family had nurtured all their lives.” * * *
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 20:31:14 +0000
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