Whither to after CARP? – updates from the peasant movement of the Philippines

KMP Research Desk
June 10, 2023

After 35 years, CARP’s only achievement is the undeniable worsening of peasant landlessness. It facilitated land monopoly under an illusion of reform, cementing the futility of “market-assisted land reform.” The program today has lost support from all camps, begging the question – what happens with the country’s land reform? Prodded by neoliberals and populist interests, the Marcos Jr regime is set to go down the same dead-end road of market-led policies.

As peasant groups asserted more than three decades ago, CARP’s market-oriented framework doomed it to failure from the beginning. Market–assisted land reform pins land redistribution on market transactions between “willing sellers” (landlords) and “willing buyers” (farmers). Fittingly, despite featuring compulsory acquisition as one of its methods, “almost 60% of [CARP’s] accomplishments were achieved through voluntary modes of acquisition”. (Ballesteros et al., 2018) Docile at the face of land monopoly, CARP’s backlog for distribution is largely (92%) composed of large private landholdings. (DAR, 2020) Worse, it set up numerous corporatization schemes to accommodate landlord reaction.

CARP joins the ranks of failed MALR programs such as in Brazil, Columbia, Guatemala, and South Africa, where it had a very “limited impact on patterns of landholding”. (Lahiff et al., 2007)

Corporatization

CARP (and consequent issuances) provided landlords with various schemes to circumvent actual redistribution and abet the most definitive aspect of peasant landlessness¹, lack of effective control. At the same time, it facilitated landlord and comprador operations using corporatization schemes which further liberalized land.

From the get-go, CARP retained large landholdings intact through various exemptions, such as those with an 18% slope or more. In case of coverage, it allowed non-land distribution schemes, most infamously through the “Stock Distribution Option”. Declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2011, SDO allowed the distribution of shares of stocks to beneficiaries instead of land, violating the very objective of land reform.

Nevertheless, CARP provided a whole array of ploys for landlords to maintain or acquire effective control over “distributed” land through various agribusiness arrangements. These measures commonly clustered numerous small beneficiaries made dependent on and dominated by big private or foreign corporations. These corporatization schemes allowed the persistence of for-export mono-crop plantation operations on lands “distributed” under CARP.

The Cory Aquino regime funded the “nucleus estate management system”; (KMP, 2000) the Ramos regime established “agrarian reform communities” (RA 7905, 1995) and made contract growing policy; (DAR AO 2 series of 1995) the Estrada regime introduced “agribusiness venture arrangements” (DAR AO 2 series of 1995); the Arroyo regime upscaled ARCs into “AR Zones” (DAR MC 4 series of 2003) and “ARC Clusters” (DAR MC 3 series of 2006); and the Noynoy Aquino regime instituted “sugarcane block farming”. (SRA, 2012)

Measuring landlessness

These various schemes made measuring the farmers’ effective control of the land more difficult. In this way, CARP attempts to muddle the extent of the land problem.²

Despite this, government data fail to completely hide the worsening landlessness since CARP. The Census on Agriculture and Fisheries, released per decade, reveals that the percentage of farmholdings “fully-owned” by its operators decreased by 12% between 1980 and 2012, dropping from 58% to 46%. (PSA, 2012.)

The real extent of this decline is likely worse since, as mentioned, a farmer may nominally own land but not have effective control of it, owing to onerous corporatization schemes. Additionally, parcelization conjures an illusion of a rising percentage of nominally owned farms.

The parcelization or individualization of collective CLOAs, legislated under CARPER, has coincided with the increase of nominally owned farmholdings. Between 2002 and 2012, the number of owned farmholdings drastically increased by 59%, the highest in any 10-year period since 1960. At the same time, however, the total area of nominally owned farms has sharply declined – dropping by 29% equivalent to 1.4 million hectares during the same period, also the largest decrease in any 10-year period since 1960. (PSA, 2012.)

The sufficiency of land to provide a decent living is harder to measure as it involves numerous variables such as size, location, fertility, type of crop or agricultural activity, labor management, level of technology, and other sources of income, among others. But that farmers’ lives are characterized by the worst poverty (PSA, 2023), hunger (PSA, 2020), and access to education already speaks volumes about the failure of CARP and the overall agricultural modernization agenda of successive regimes. More particularly, CARP itself had little to no difference in improving the lives of its beneficiaries than if they acquired land through other means. (Ballesteros et al., 2018)

Focusing on farm size and using CARP’s definition of “landless beneficiaries” as those “who [own] less than three hectares of agricultural land”, one can get a glimpse of CARP’s effect on land sufficiency. The CAF data shows that the percentage of farmers owning less than three hectares of land have surged by 20% during the same period, increasing from 69% to 89%. (PSA, 2012.) From 7 out of 10 in 1980, the number of farmers working on less than three hectares has increased to 9 out of 10 in 2012.

Conversion, coercion

CARP’s implementation coincided with the onset of the problem of land use conversion. Here, DAR also served to facilitate the conversion of vast tracts of agricultural lands for a different type of landed elite. 

These large landholders include the biggest oligarchs in the country, such as the Villars of Vista Land and Ramon Ang of the San Miguel Corporation. Backed by foreign capital, such compradors acquire vast tracts of land for land banking and speculation, real estate, construction, mining, energy, and tourism, among others.

Between 1988 and 2016, DAR issued conversion orders for 97,592 hectares of CARP-covered lands. (Cabildo et al., 2017) According to the CAF, the country’s total area of farmholdings decreased by 2.67 million hectares or almost a third (27%) between 1991 and 2012. (PSA, 2012.) Regardless of the legal means available to them, landed interests employ illegal and coercive means to eject farmers and undertake land grabbing. This includes making use of dummy beneficiaries, illicit leaseback arrangements or aryendo, and plain bribery, harassment, or violence. Inutile in confronting the roots of feudal power, CARP proved incapable to suppress these violations. Worse, landlords have also criminalized agrarian disputes, weaponizing the law by charging farmer-claimants with trumped-up criminal cases, or more recently, turning to red-tagging, among others.

Neoliberals against land reform

Jumping on CARP’s abject failure, neoliberal economists disparage the legitimacy of land reform altogether, diverting accountability from CARP’s fundamental market-led framework. Instead, they push for more “free market” measures to further liberalize land.

The World Bank itself is hard-pressed at pronouncing CARP a success. Its 2009 study on the program characterized it as having “modest” positive impacts (based on an estimated 10% contribution to “poverty reduction” for eight years). (World Bank, 2009) Similarly, a 2017 study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies prudently described CARP’s accomplishments as “significant,” (based primarily on its coverage), further noting that its welfare gains are “muted”. 

Neoliberals are harsher, declaring CARP a “total failure” (Chikiamco, 2015) which “did more harm than good”. (Ocampo, 2020) Disdainful of any “market-distorting” reforms, neoliberal dogmatists push for a “free” land market and further corporatization in agriculture.

To this end, the World Bank and DAR launched the SPLIT project in 2020. It is supposedly meant to strengthen beneficiaries’ property rights and access to credit and capital by parcelizing collective CLOAs. Similarly, PIDS has recommended that the indefeasibility of CLOAs and “instability” in property rights be addressed, government resources focus on “increasing productivity,” and that issues of land concentration be delegated to a “convergence” of land agencies. (Ballesteros et al., 2018) Policy-wise, this means amending or repealing CARP, expanding corporatization schemes, and abolishing or subsuming DAR under a new or different agency. Neoliberals again take it a step further by advocating for allowing 100% foreign land ownership through charter change. 

Treading the same dead-end road of market-orientation as in CARP and much of the country’s neoliberal policies, these measures are doomed to fail in addressing the land problem, rural poverty, and agricultural backwardness. The neoliberals’ blind veneration of the market-oriented approach restricts them from recognizing its faults and the merits of other models of development.

Bureaucrats for populist measures

Despite these, government officials have repeatedly brandished some support for CARP. This is explained by the enduring populist appeal and the pacifying tendency of programs having any semblance to agrarian reform.

In the first place, the Cory Aquino regime was only compelled to enact CARP to pacify protests after the Mendiola Massacre in 1988 and to block proposals for throughgoing redistribution. It has since duped some farmers’ groups into supporting CARP.

The program’s fundamental flaws were again put to national attention after the Hacienda Luisita Massacre in 2004. This time, peasant and advocacy groups led community consultations nationwide to craft alternative legislation. In 2007, Anakpawis Partylist filed the landmark proposal Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill for the first time. GARB articulates a thoroughgoing and redistributive agrarian reform program by upholding the progressive provisions of the 1987 Constitution.

The public clamor against CARP and the threat of a GARB enactment compelled the Arroyo regime to legislate the similarly market-led CARPER by 2009.

CARP only became more inutile since the expiration of its land acquisition and distribution (LAD) component on June 30, 2014. The expiration of LAD, supposedly the core aspect of the program, gravely restricted the already underutilized powers of DAR in confronting land monopoly. Consequently, CLOA distribution has drastically dropped since 2015. (Peña, 2022) Its main implementing agency has since then struggled to justify its existence.

Claiming electoral victory on a slew of populist promises, Duterte also professed support for land reform. Among its earliest acts was the historic but short-lived appointment of Rafael Mariano as DAR secretary. 

The first and only peasant to head the agency, Mariano’s leadership of DAR was characterized by an upsurge in the participation of poor peasant organizations in advancing agrarian cases. Responding to CARP’s expiration, he enlivened the agency by advocating for a new law on agrarian reform, particularly GARB. 

He was however kicked out after just 18 months by the Commission on Appointments of the landlord-dominated Congress.

Once again stuck with LAD-less CARP and divorced from the peasant movement, DAR has turned to other preoccupations.

Instead of asserting the urgent completion of its backlog, composed mostly of private lands, Duterte’s EO 75 (2019) turned the agency in the opposite direction, instructing it to award more public lands. The same year, the agency released AO 2 (2019), making conversion applications easier and quicker.

Since 2020, the agency has been most engaged in implementing the WB SPLIT project, the loan for which has since constituted a third of its budget annually.

Marcos Jr’s land policy

The seeming opposing views of neoliberals and populists from the same reactionary camp have always coalesced into some sort of compromise. Currently, the Marcos Jr regime addresses both in particular ways.

Snatching electoral victory through widespread disinformation, Marcos Jr’s populist measures on land reform are in the form of pretenses of free land distribution. 

Marcos Jr released EO 4 in September 2023, implementing a one-year moratorium on amortization payments for CARP beneficiaries. He has also expressed support for the proposed New Agrarian Emancipation Act which will condone or write off beneficiaries’ debts. Currently, the bill has passed both Congress and is now only awaiting the president’s signature. (Pabico, 2023)

Both measures have been made possible only by the continued assertion of the Filipino peasantry for free land distribution. While these may offer some relief to around 610,000 beneficiaries, they are no substitute for a new, throughgoing, and redistributive agrarian reform program.

Especially since the Marcos Jr regime pursues other more sinister ways to further liberalize land and agriculture. Acting as concurrent Agriculture Secretary, Marcos Jr has pushed for further corporatization in agriculture under the guise of developing “value chains”, consolidating farms, and reviving Masagana 99, among others.

Marcos Jr has pushed for the country’s inclusion in the China-led RCEP and US-led IPEF, both set to deepen the local economy’s foreign dependence through unequal trade. Similarly, he has pushed for bilateral free trade agreements with the US and the European Union.

Aside from the P19-billion-worth SPLIT, the WB has hurriedly funded the P45-billion Philippine Rural Development Project (PRDP) Scale-Up which promotes ramping up the production of for-export and other cash crops. (Aning, 2023) Marcos Jr has also met with the Thai agro-industrial and food conglomerate Charoen Pokphand Group which has promised USD 2.5 billion investment in agriculture (Ayeng, 2023), and sealed a partnership with the South Korean KAMICO for an initial USD 30 million investment for mechanization. (Abbey, 2023)

Among the administration’s priority legislations, the proposed National Land Use Act (NaLUA) and the 30-year National Infrastructure Program have both passed the Lower House. (de Leon, 2023) Both are set to worsen the problem of land use conversion, in conjunction with the regime’s Build-Better-More program which added 123 new flagship projects to its predecessor.

Marcos Jr has also supported an economic charter change, which can include 100% foreign land ownership. (Porcalla, 2023)

The regime’s main line today continues the old corporatization scheme: “consolidating” or “integrating” small farmers under “big brother” corporations (Concepcion, 2023), through various means including leaseholdership (Dar, 2023) and “mentorship”, among others, to attain “economies of scale.” This is the same failed strategy implemented alongside CARP since the 1990s.

People-led land reform

The basic reality remains: there is still no genuine land reform. Without this, peasant landlessness can only worsen. 

A genuine agrarian reform program resolves the land problem by mobilizing peasants and exercising state power to (1) break up land monopoly, (2) freely distribute land to tillers, (3) promote cooperativization, (4) provide intensive support services, and (5) build rural industries towards national development.

Such a program addresses the peasantry’s historical plight for social justice, provides rural jobs and livelihoods, builds food self-sufficiency, and protects the environment, among others. 

A genuine land reform program can be achieved in several ways. Foremost is through the militant action of peasant organizations. Meeting certain conditions, some local peasant groups have successfully wrested control of the land they till from elites. Challenging the confines of agrarian law, these acts are based on Constitutional provisions recognizing the right of farmers to the land they till.

In such communities, peasant organizations lead in allocating individual or collective plots, building cooperative production and raising productivity and incomes, and gathering all kinds of support from sympathetic elements.  In times of landlord or state attack, the peasants defend their rights in an organized manner and in firm coordination with a broad array of supporters from religious people, artists, lawyers, and academics, among others. In this context, firm organizational unity serves as the most decisive land title peasants have.

In the legislature, GARB is currently filed as House Bill 1161 in Congress. While landlord-dominated, the parliament is nevertheless an indispensable arena of struggle in advancing the plight of Filipino peasants. 

Another possible arena is the peace negotiations between the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines. Intermittent since the 1990s, the negotiations had reached socio-economic reforms as its agenda, which included agrarian reform and rural development. The two camps even reached an agreement on the principle of free land distribution (Colina, 2017) before the talks were unilaterally terminated by then-President Duterte in 2017. (Corrales, 2017)

Prospects for formal peace talks remain bleak with the continued terrorist-labeling of the NTF ELCAC, the Anti-Terror Law, and several militarists in pertinent government positions. Unsurprisingly, the recently appointed Defense secretary Gilbert Teodoro has already expressed his opposition to peace talks. Marcos Jr himself however has remained silent on the issue since becoming President. (Gita-Carlos, 2023)

Beyond these, radical land reform programs which spurred nationwide agricultural development and industrialization have been successfully undertaken during and after revolutions in capitalist Europe, the US, and Japan in the 1800s; and in socialist Russia, China, and Vietnam in the 1900s. Such a revolutionary road remains open for the Philippines.

Regardless, while neoliberal economists and populist bureaucrats wallow in the discredited market-led framework, peasants and other toiling masses can continue resolutely advancing people-led and people-oriented reforms in a myriad of ways. #

Photos of the June 8-9 “March of Peasants” by UMANI, NNARA-Youth, and SINAGBAYAN.

¹ Aside from (1) absence of legal or nominal ownership, we define peasant landlessness as (2) lack of effective control and (3) insufficiency to provide decent living.

² A 2017 study led by then DAR Secretary Rafael Mariano in Hacienda Luisita, the country’s most infamous agrarian case, might be indicative. It revealed that 83% of CARP beneficiaries in Hacienda Luisita were “no longer in possession of awarded lands”. (DAR, 2017) Since Mariano was booted out, however, DAR has so far failed to launch a similar study elsewhere, much less nationwide.

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