“To prepare Philippine Agriculture for globalization, farming should be treated as an enterprise.” These were the words of Prudencio Gordoncillo, a professor at the University of the Philippines at Los Baños who reviewed studies of the first ten years of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).
Basically, what is known about CARP are merely surface knowledge and long been established facts; that it was born during President Aquino’s administration and that it is being known as Republic Act 6657 or the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law in our constitution. The law’s approval on February 1986 embedded a sense of “social justice” among the tenant farmers and at the same time, provided hope for these poor farmers to acquire a piece of land that they can call their own. The program will soon commence on June 2008, completing its 20-year development program. Now here is the question: has CARP really proven its worth to the Filipinos?
As for me who spent my pre-college life in a vast plantation in Davao del Norte, I couldn’t really deduce that it has indeed served its purpose in terms of defining “agrarian reform” at its very sense. About 7 years ago, thousands of hectares were still in tact in the empire-like banana plantation I live in. It made me conclude that the plantation’s patriarch is just so much of a powerful economic elite that the program can’t mess up with. Although a relatively few land grants have been awarded to the land’s tenants, their independent production of banana is a failure compared to the extensive mass production of the plantation. These independent producers, also properly referred to as “beneficiaries”, often get no profit for their produce since their cost of production which includes towering fertilizer and pesticide costs, is greater than their actual sales. In the end, the point of independent farming and developing into a stable “micro-farmer”, for the lack of a better term, is deemed defeated. After a land has been granted, the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) should set a transition time and monitor how the land is being utilized, and if it is contributing to economic growth by its profits as a new “enterprise”. I have observed that this was taken for granted and was not properly looked after to.
