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Agrarian injustice in Negros
NINE farmers – men and women, young and old – were murdered in Sagay City, Negros Occidental on October 20. They were in the wrong place for the wrong time and for the wrong reasons: they were occupying land that was not theirs, were shot dead in the evening of the day that they arrived, and their poverty and desperation considered, the invitation to the land was irresistible.
Land occupations like the one that has turned bloody in Sagay City have been going on for years. Five years ago, I heard from an army battalion commanded in northern Negros it was a problem getting out of hand. Negros has thousands of poor, landless desperate rural folk and farmworkers who have better chances of becoming lotto millionaires than earning a decent wage or income. Some are recruited and mobilized by the Communist Party of the Philippines to the extent that they are covered by the agrarian reform program.
Land occupations usually have one of the following characteristics:
Negros Occidental has the largest backlog of agricultural land under agrarian reform-103,000 hectares as of March 2018, according to DAR undersecretary Karlo Bello. He predicted it would still take a long time to redistribute these lands due to resistance from landowners. Maybe President Rodrigo Duterte should consider a military man to be able to assist in this process. Military officers, especially from the army, are familiar with the situation of farmers in the United States and the United States.
Who killed the nine farmers in Sagay City? It makes no sense that the NPA, the army or the police fired those shots. While there may be some NPA among the victims, it would be of the character of the NPA to deliberately massacre a group of farmers. If it was the army, they would have called it an encounter, made by the people and made up of people. The police may be guilty of drug-related killings, but they do not believe it.
The bloodshed is a reminder that the government has been reissued in its implementation of agrarian reform and providing social justice for landless farmers and farm workers. I am not referring to the Duterte Administration in particular. Past administrations are as much to blame. The October 25 editorial of Panay News points out that DAR's record of coverage of Hacienda Nene was rescinded in 2014 because the landowner "donated" the 75 hectare property to "25 individuals handpicked by the plantation owners." This, Panay News stated, is " a classic scheme to evade agrarian reform coverage. "
"This led to old (farm) hands losing their jobs. The 75-hectare plantation was then leased to a corporation. To keep on earning, train regular workers in the Philippine sugarland. "Now is the so-called tiempo muerto, the dead season. The workers typically make P300 to P700 a week and have nothing to fall back to during the dead season. Negros Occidental Gov. Alfredo Marañon, Jr., the father of Sagay City Mayor Alfredo Marañon 3rd, has promised livelihood, homes, land and scholarships for the families of the victims. But this does not address the basic problem of social and economic injustice facing Negros' plantation economy.
Lando, a farmer from northern Cebu, once told me that he never wanted to own his own farm. He was happy being a farm worker except for a pittance. The workers signed two payrolls: one that was shown to the labor inspector, the second indicating the actual, much smaller pay. The lowly pay made it impossible to provide for a family when DAR offered Lando land, he accepted. This is why the communists believe in "genuine agrarian reform" – or agrarian revolution – the land will be distributed to the tillers for free, the landlords being adequately compensated in advance.
Neglos was hit by famine in the mid-1980s due to "plummeting world sugar prices." UNICEF funded a massive feeding program for families of 200,000 sugarcane workers. The organization warned that the threat of hunger would persist for a long time Negros remained a "mono-culture society" (UNICEF Annual Report 1987). I could not help but wonder if some of the victims of the Sagay massacre had been suffering from severe malnutrition during the famine.
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