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What Is Agrarian Reform? Why This Should Be Implemented?

The document discusses several problems that have caused failures in implementing the agrarian reform law in the Philippines. These include: limited land coverage excluded by the law, variable retention limits favoring large landowners, slow land acquisition processes, lack of funding, complex legal requirements, and schemes allowing landowners like Hacienda Luisita to maintain control rather than truly redistributing land to farmers. Overall, the failures stem from shortcomings in the design and implementation of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program that have prevented it from fully achieving its goals of benefiting farmers and promoting social justice.

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Rachelle Lausa
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77 views4 pages

What Is Agrarian Reform? Why This Should Be Implemented?

The document discusses several problems that have caused failures in implementing the agrarian reform law in the Philippines. These include: limited land coverage excluded by the law, variable retention limits favoring large landowners, slow land acquisition processes, lack of funding, complex legal requirements, and schemes allowing landowners like Hacienda Luisita to maintain control rather than truly redistributing land to farmers. Overall, the failures stem from shortcomings in the design and implementation of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program that have prevented it from fully achieving its goals of benefiting farmers and promoting social justice.

Uploaded by

Rachelle Lausa
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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What is agrarian reform? Why this should be implemented?

Agrarian Reform is the redistribution of lands whatever crops or fruits produced to


farmers and regular farmworkers who do not own any land. Regardless of tenurial
arrangement to include the totality of factors and support services designed to help the
economic status of the beneficiaries and all other arrangements alternative to the physical
redistribution of lands such as production or profit-sharing, labor administration, and the
distribution of shares of stocks which will allow beneficiaries to receive a just share of the
fruits of the lands they work. The agrarian reform program that was made is established on
the right of farmers and regular farm workers who do not own any land, to own directly or
collectively the lands they worked, or in the case of other farm workers, to receive a just
share of the fruits thereof. This was stated in Republic Act No. 6657, known as
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law of 1988, which is an act instituting a comprehensive
agrarian reform program to promote social justice and industrialization, providing the
mechanism for its implementation, and for other purposes.

It should be implemented to promote social justice and industrialization. Thus, the


declaration of principles includes;

1. The State shall encourage and undertake the just distribution of all agricultural lands,
subject to the priorities and retention limits set forth in this Act, having taken into
account ecological, developmental, and equity considerations, and subject to the
payment of just compensation.
2. The state shall respect the right of small landowners, and shall provide incentives for
voluntary land-sharing.
3. The state shall recognize the right of farmers, farmworkers and landowners, as well as
cooperatives and other independent farmers' organizations, to participate in the
planning, organization, and management of the program, and shall provide support to
agriculture through appropriate technology and research, and adequate financial
production, marketing and other support services.
4. The state shall apply the principles of agrarian reform, or stewardship, whenever
applicable, in accordance with law, in the disposition or utilization of other natural
resources, including lands of the public domain, under lease or concession, suitable to
agriculture, subject to prior rights, homestead rights of small settlers and the rights of
indigenous communities to their ancestral lands. Moreover, the state may resettle
landless farmers and farmworkers in its own agricultural estates, which shall be
distributed to them in the manner provided by law. By means of appropriate
incentives, the State shall encourage the formation and maintenance of economic-size
family farms to be constituted by individual beneficiaries and small landowners.
5. The State shall protect the rights of subsistence fishermen, especially of local
communities, to the preferential use of communal marine and fishing resources, both
inland and offshore.t shall provide support to such fishermen through appropriate
technology and research, adequate financial, production and marketing assistance and
other services. The State shall also protect, develop and conserve such resources. The
protection shall extend to offshore fishing grounds of subsistence fishermen against
foreign intrusion. Fish workers shall receive a just share from their labor in the
utilization of marine and fishing resources.
6. The state shall be guided by the principles that land has a social function and land
ownership has a social responsibility. Owners of agricultural lands have the obligation
to cultivate directly or through labor administration the lands they own and thereby
make the land productive.
7. The state shall provide incentives to landowners to invest the proceeds of the agrarian
reform program to promote industrialization, employment and privatization of public
sector enterprises. Financial instruments used as payment for lands shall contain
features that shall enhance negotiability and acceptability in the marketplace.
8. And lastly, the state may lease undeveloped lands of the public domain to qualified
entities for the development of capital-intensive farms, and traditional and pioneering
crops especially those for exports subject to the prior rights of the beneficiaries under
this Act.

As a conclusion Agrarian reform program should be implemented not because it is the


policy of the State to pursue a Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) but for the
good of the landless farmers and farm workers. That they will receive the full consideration
to promote social justice and to move the nation toward sound rural development and
industrialization, and the establishment of owner cultivator ship of economic-size farms as
the basis of Philippine agriculture. Also, for more fair distribution and ownership of land with
appropriate consideration to the rights of landowners to pay fairly and to the ecological
necessity of the nation shall be adopted to provide farmers and farm workers with the
opportunity to improve their status and improve the quality of their lives through greater
productivity of agricultural lands.

What are the problems that cause some failure of the agrarian reform law in the
Philippines?

In a study made by Adriano (1991) entitled “A General Assessment of the


Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program”, she noted that there are several failure of the
agrarian reform law in the legal basis of Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP)
that will worsen the already unfair agrarian structure in the country. One of these is the
limited area coverage of the law where it excludes a long list of land types that constitutes the
non-reform sector. Another failure is that Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL)
endorses variable retention limit. She also noted that the CARL favors only a small portion of
the landowning class and these are the corporate and commercial farm owners and the rural
middle class. The CARL also tend to benefit renter-landowners so long as they convert their
tenant-based arrangements to either owner-cultivator ship or direct administration
arrangements or change the land use type from agricultural to non- 19 agricultural. While the
law is intended to benefit agricultural lessees and share tenants, their chances of getting a
larger share of the reformed area will depend on their ability to organize their sector and fight
for their welfare. Thus, she also emphasized that the main losers of the CARL are the landless
rural farm workers who have no farms to rent or permanent employment in plantations.

Moreover, according to Adriano in her study entitled “DAR, Land Reform-Related


Agencies and the CARP: Government and Alternative Approaches to Land Acquisition and
Distribution”, she mentioned that several factors contributing to the poor performance of
CARP in land distribution include: a) the slow pace in land survey process; b) backlogs in
land registration; c) lack of support from landowners largely because of the slow processing
of and low payment for their land; and d) cumbersome land acquisition and distribution
process for each land type. There are also features of the Land Acquisition and Distribution
that were created to discourage rent-seeking activities. These include: a) numerous
documents required in various phases; b) the difficulty in the coordination of land-reform-
related activities by various agencies; and c) the multi-layered countercheck systems. These
features however affected the speedy enforcement of land reform causing also
decentralization in the decision-making process.
She mentioned further that DAR’s slow performance in land acquisition and
distribution was a consequence more of the slow development in the land acquisition process
than on the distribution component. One factor causing slow acquisition is the problem of
limited funds. To address this, Land Acquisition and Distribution and not non-Land
Acquisition and Distribution activities should be prioritized in budgeting while personnel
staff has to be streamlined and re-aligned to bring down personnel costs. Another way of
evaluating the performance of CARP in uplifting the quality of life of its beneficiaries is
looking at its effect on their income and productivity. She further noted that the farms of the
Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries are relatively small (less than 2 hectares) and mostly rain fed
in lowland and upland areas and most of the farms operate with limited area of mechanization
and meager amount spent on material inputs for farm operations. This is one reason why
agricultural income remains to be very low and limited (Bravo et al 2000).

Additional failure is that CARP was understood as adhering to lands-to-the-tiller


principle. However, it was violated and these modalities of land transfer favor the landowners
who can persuade the beneficiaries to adopt a scheme that will make them still in control of
farms. Example is the case of Hacienda Luisita, the scheme favor landlords more than the
farmers. To keep the vast land intact, the management entered into stock distribution with the
farm workers in 1988, a scheme provided in the CARL in redistributing the land. This left the
owners the entire right and power to manage and control the farm operation. And this
constitutes unfulfilled promise of lands-to-the-tiller as hailed by the CARL farmers during
Corazon Aquino’s term.

Overall these are the problems that cause some failure of the agrarian reform law in
the Philippines that should be given appropriate considerations by the government. The mere
fact that CARP has been implemented for more than thirty years and has gone through
different political debacles and legal maneuver, this makes the land reform in great disbelief.
It is a symbol of weak government and tainted political will of leadership. And this has been
proven by the reviews of agrarian reform law over the last decade shows that the
redistribution of lands has often not successful in attaining goals because poverty remains
unchanged.

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