Mr. President: Agrarian Reform Now

 Our call to social justice is not afterall inutile. The Philippine Supreme Court ruled with finality that the vast sugar plantations are covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law or R.A. No. 6657. Our sugar farmers will be able to till their own lands soon - a victory of concerted advocacy to distribute lands from the hacienderos to the landless farmers.

Landlessness is a major cause of worsening poverty in rural Philippines.  The poorest Filipinos are the landless farmers who earn their living from hired-labor or tenancy on farms owned by landlords. No matter how hard they work all day, they are not able to earn what their families need to live decently.

To reduce rural poverty in the country, agrarian reform promises to be a potent force. A piece of land to the farmers who toil all day is a dream fulfilled and deserved. They will finally be able to reap the fruit of their labor. Working hard will eventually pay off. Imagine the joy, empowerment and splendored dream that go with that piece of land to farmers, their children, and their communities.

Land distribution to actual farmers is a key to poverty alleviation in rural areas. Economic data may show otherwise, but here is my take on it. Without land, farmers urge their children to join them as hired-laborers in the fields for additional income of the family. With land, farmers send their children to schools and ask their help in the weekends. This scenario cannot be captured by economic data and yet a valuable data nonetheless.

Land ownership brings the farmers into the market system which drives our economy. Imagine hundreds of thousands additional players in the market system. Landlords will remain players in the market system due to their retained estate holdings and other mainstream economic activities.

Two decades of agrarian reform have partially demonstrated the promises of land reform. It was two decades of trying stages of learning and taking further the lessons in the implementation of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) by the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR).

The Senate approved the CARP extension for another five years with P 147 billion to cover 1.6 million hectares for distribution to landless farmer-beneficiaries. The House of Representatives also passed CARP extension. Extending a government program means that there is an unfinished and incomplete task.
What remains to be distributed are the contentious private large estates. This is where the compulsory land distribution and acquisition component of CARP will be tested again. The creative and controversial “corporative ownership” scheme is allowed in the extended CARP approved by the Senate.

Many argue that this “corporative ownership” scheme is a better set up to keep up the production of land. However, this does not effectively transfer land ownership to the farmer-beneficiaries. In the end, farmers are left wondering whether they truly own the land they till or not.

For the farmers, it is logical to pass and implement CARP right away. Land conversions of agricultural lands to industrial and other uses take away the golden opportunity from farmers of owning a land where they can start building their dreams of a good life.

Agrarian reform now is a call for social justice due to poor farmers in the rural areas. Mr. President, please.

“Live simply that others may simply live” (Remembering Ka Bel)

“Honorable Beltran, could you come down from there?”

He does come down willingly, joyfully.

And now he is with us forever.

Ka Bel wants to do it on his own. He wants to see it done. He wants it fixed. What is it, Ka Bel? A hole on the roof. A corruption scandal. An inhuman working condition. An insufficient wage. An arrogance and lavishness of the elite. A disempowered working class.

I heard him speak. We heard him speak. His words express what we dare not to speak about. His words reverberate in the grumblings of hunger, sleeplessness of tired bodies, restlessness of bonded souls, passing of hours, days, nights of gripping injustices experienced by working class.

I saw him walk in the protest lines. I saw him lead. I saw him wave from inside of the hospital.

“I am OK. I am with you.”

I felt his energy, his boiling determination that melts any stubborn hearts and minds. His passion for change, for love of his own class and country, dwarf the scale and magnitude of the forces of status quo. Are we going to let it be?

His life is simple, very simple. In the human standards, he is the poorest among the honorable men and women of congress. In the other Congress somewhere where men and women are truly honorable, his wealth is immeasurable, for there is nothing to measure except one’s faith and deeds.

Ka Bel has faith in the Filipino people. He believes in our capability to fight against injustices. And he believes that we will triumph. Our triumph is his triumph too.

Are we going to fail him?

Governing the government

My frustration on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico makes me remember this article.

Everytime the oil prices hike due to deregulation, the government’s excuse is that the price is set by the market. With that, it can do nothing about it. So why then we have a government that does nothing on matters that directly affect us all? I am reminded by an old article of mine written seven years ago.
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“Whenever the powers of government are placed in anyhands other than those of the community – whether those of man, of a few, or of several – those principles of human nature which imply that government is at all necessary imply that those persons will make use of them to defeat the very end for which government exits.” (James Mill, An Essay on Government)

If a government says it can do nothing on matters of national effect and concern except invoking a law that is clearly anti-people, what can it do for itself to save from extinction?

Everytime Shell, Caltex and Petron otherwise collectively known as the Big 3 raise their prices of oil almost simultaneously, the straight-faced reason is that they are losing money separately yet similarly. And the government watches on the sideline with its eager helplessness and (mis)understood the incomprehensible price incrases in the midst of a crisis without a sly attempt to liosten to the cry of the people – where we are taught the sovereignty of the government resides.

Are the oil companies really losing money? According to Rep. Ernesto Herrera of Bohol, they are NOT. On the records filed by these oil firms with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), they by and large profited to a jolting Php 18.6 billion with Shell having P7.45 billion; Petron, P6.54 billion; and Caltex P4.64 billion. However, they claim that these profits actually reflected very modest returns compared to 1996 when the oil industry was not yet deregulated.

Oddly, the Deparment of Energy that is monitoring the oil industry has nothing interesting to say to the people except defending the activites of the Big 3. It is understandably welcome for the oil firms to have a spokesperson from the government itself, being a sentinel of the welfare of the people supposedly. It looks like the government is willing to pay for the sins of the Big 3 disposing  its truest nature and service to the “people” – the people it knows all along, former colleagues, friends, relatives, affluent, and the masses (in no particular order, I suppose).

As Rousseau in the Social Contract would state emphatically, “nothing is more dangerous than the influence of private interest in public affairs, and the abuse of the laws by the government is a less evil than the corruption of the legislation..” Save the Herrera’s expose on the “modest profits” of the Big 3, the Congress is in a way nurturing the stifling situation by sitting on a bill that will eventually amend the Oil Deregulation Law and foster competition which the law intends. In the bill, the creation of the National Oil Exchange which will bid the national oil needs from the lowest bidder among the international oil traders will tremble the oil cartel of the Big 3 on its bending knees, cutting its clout in the government. They will be forced to low down their prices to win the bidding and be able to continue supplying the oil needs of the country. On the recent oil price hike, the Speaker of the House nonetheless has threatened inexpediently the Big 3 of the repeal of the Oil Deregulation Law if they continue acting like a cartel. Where has the speaker been all this long as he is the only soul left unconvinced of the cartel? He needs a little dose of history of the oil price fluctuations of the Big 3 that require no further inquiry to resolve the existence of a cartel.

In the globalizing world, the national govenment is being run over by the mighty capital of the transnational companies such as the Big 3. It is left unconditionally powerless and insignificant in the moneyed world without borders. Couples with the government’s thrust toward industrialization and globalization, these transnational companies suggestively assume the token seat of power – the government. And they are gaining ground to hold on to the seat as long as the actual owner wills it.

Do we?

The great Rousseau reminds us that people that would always govern well need not be governed. Essentially, democracy promotes people’s active participation in the decisionmaking of the state. The government – let it rule for the end of common good.

In the first proposition of Kant in the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, he writes “that an action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.” Now the people ask, how about inaction?