Forty Years of Struggle
In the Bible the number 40 means a very long time. When we read that “it rained 40 days and 40 nights,” that is not to be understood literally; simply that it rained for a long. long time.
This morning, I thought of the biblical meaning of 40 when I met Atty. Camilo Sabio at the Pius XII Catholic Center. We were there for what has been billed as the Agrarian Reform Summit of Stakeholders, which is also the third Bishops-Legislators Caucus on the issue of extending CARP and reforming it.
I met Mil Sabio around 40 years ago, when he was a lawyer with the Federation of Free Farmers. I had been introduced to agrarian reform as the main social justice issue in the Philippines by Jerry Montemayor, whose son Leonie was also at the summit. There were also veteran FFF farmer-leaders and organizers, including Boy Tan from Bukidnon. As we reminisced about our years together in the struggle, I realized that it has been 40 years ago!
It has been a very long struggle. And it will continue to be a very long struggle.
Of course the struggle for social justice in the rural areas has gone on much longer than 40 years. The 40 is a personal reference, since 1968 was when I got ordained as an SVD priest, after which I asked my superiors to assign me as a chaplain of the FFF.
The Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program or CARP was passed into law in 1988, part of the fruits of EDSA 1986. As Atty. Christian Monsod explained, it was a law that reflected the compromises of those who held power after the restoration of formal democracy. CARP is revolutionary in its intentions, since it wanted to redistribute agricultural land from the landlords ( big and small ) to the small farmers. But it chose to do this through the processes of the restored democratic order, with its checks and balances, and its domination by the elite.
Twenty years later, we can assess CARP as either “half full or half empty,” in the words of Archbishop Tony Ledesma, the lead convenor of the National Rural Congress II which is being convened by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. There are around one million ARBs or agrarian reform beneficiaries. But there are still two million hectares of public and private land waiting to be redistributed under CARP.
The LAD ( land acquisition and distribution ) component of CARP fell very short of its original 10-year target deadline. We lobbied and campaigned in 1998 to extend funding for CARP, and it got a 10-year extension, which expires this year on Friday the 13th of June.
Today’s summit and yesterday’s pre-summit are part of the campaign to seek another extension of CARP. More precisely, of its LAD component, as Congressman Edcel Lagman clarified. He championed the 1998 extension, and has played an important role in the current campaign.
There’s some good news. The House committee on agrarian reform passed a consolidated bill by majority vote; it now awaits debate in plenary. There is also steady but slower movement in the Senate.
Even better news is that many bishops have taken up the cause of agrarian reform. It is fair to say that the militant grassroots campaign of farmers organizations and their NGO partners would not have gotten this far if the bishops hadn’t thrown their open and official support.
That’s what I said in the brief “synthesis” I was asked to give at the summit. I reminded everyone that there is no real summit without a base and slopes; that’s the flaw of other “summits” convened by government , which starts at the top. This summit is different, since it acknowledges and builds on the work of the grassroots and the “middle forces.” But without the participation of those on top - leaders in power institutions, our cause cannot successfully compete for what may be one of the scarcest resources, which is public attention.
The legislators at the summit cautioned the bishops and the farmers about the resistance that the proposed extension will face in the plenary. They urged the bishops to talk to the representatives in their dioceses, and mobilize their constituencies. Part of the interesting discussion at the summit was how to define what is “just compensation” for the land owners, especially since some courts interpret this as based on market price. The current law cites too many factors to consider, which gives courts too much leeway. There seems to be a need to pass a law that defines this more precisely and fairly, and the bishops took up the challenge to provide the moral basis for this.
The summit participants are seasoned enough to acknowledge the role of real politik even if our only intention is to extend the present law. But we also want to reform the law, and this is not just to improve it, but also a real politik move to separate the “soft opposition” from the hardliners. Even those who support the extension of CARP acknowledge that there are those who don’t want a mere extension of the law, but are willing to go along if there are reforms that accompany the extension.
There is a long list of reforms that we want. The challenge is how to push for as much as we want, while accepting that not everything we want is possible under the current balance of forces. I tried to capture this idea as ang pinakamagandang pwede - a third way between those who are willing to settle for mere extension and those who would not accept anything less than all the reforms we want.
