CPP: Gov’t dominated by landlords dooms CARP under Noy

From the Daily Tribune (Jun 13): CPP: Gov’t dominated by landlords dooms CARP under Noy

Those who currently wield power in government, who are members of big landholding clans, are a testament to the futility of agrarian reform under President Aquino and after 25 years, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) merely defrauded farmers in their pursuit of social justice, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) yesterday said.

The CPP added the fraudulence of the CARP is underscored by the fact that the biggest haciendas remain untouched and under the monopoly control of the big landlords after 25 years of the law’s implementation.

“This is further stressed by the fact that the reactionary state is currently being administered by Benigno Aquino III, a scion of the Cojuangco landlord clan,” the communist group said in a statement.

“Hacienda Luisita, the starkest symbol of feudal rule, continues to be under the control of the Cojuangcos through the use of deception, bureaucratic manipulation and armed suppression,” the CPP stressed.

The CPP said big haciendas continue to be a major feature of the rural landscape.

“The Aquinos, Roxases, Aranetas and other big landlord families wallow in excessive luxury,” it said.

“They live in palatial homes, wear designer clothes, eat imported meat, drink expensive wine, party in lavish hotels, jetset and race their gas-guzzling sports cars for fun,” the CPP added.

“The absence of genuine land reform is the most conspicuous demonstration of the absence of genuine democracy in the Philippines,” the CPP said.

On June 10, 1998, former President Corazon Aquino, the incumbents mother, signed into law the CARP.

Nothing fundamental had changed since then regarding giant landholdings in the country, according to the CPP.

“The landlords continue to subject millions of Filipino peasants to feudal and semifeudal exploitation with their haciendas and other feudal holdings,” the CPP said.

The CARP and its extension program, the CARPer have no difference from the Presidential Decree 27 issued by former President Ferdinand Marcos.

After seven decades, the Filipino peasantry remains landless and subjected to grave exploitation and oppression because all previous land reform programs have bogus, the CPP said.

“The CARP and all other previous bogus land reform programs are projects of deception by the landlord-dominated reactionary state.

“These merely seek to squash the widespread demand for land and quell the peasant masses’ democratic struggle for genuine land reform,” the CPP said.

The majority of Filipinos comprised of landless peasants and poor farm-workers suffer daily from excessive land rent, extremely low wages, high-cost of agricultural inputs, low farm-gate prices, usurious loans and other forms of feudal and semifeudal exploitation and oppression, the CPP said.

The CPP added that hundreds of thousands of peasants are displaced from their lands with the landlords’ large-scale conversion of agricultural lands to non-agricultural use to skirt the land reform law and earn themselves a quick profit.

The massive influx of foreign mining companies further displaces minority peoples from their lands and poisons agricultural lands and waterways, it said.

There is complete lack of economic progress to absorb the rural labor force into modern industries.

The CPP said the Philippine countryside is a sea of the unemployed and underemployed, where rural income is pulled down and peasant masses drown in hunger and poverty.

“Peasant organizations have dismissed the CARP as a mere real estate transaction where feudal estates subjected to state acquisition are overvalued.

“Peasants lose their so-called certificates of land transfer in their inability to pay the exorbitant amortization rates,” the CPP said.

In the vast plains of Mindanao, by using the name of “economies of scale,” so-called beneficiaries are compelled to join “agrarian reform communities” to force their integration into a vast plantation system for the production of bananas, sugar cane, rubber, oil palm and other export crops.

“They are made to buy seedlings and agricultural inputs and compelled to sell their produce to big landlords and exporters.

“Foreign monopoly capitalists continue to take advantage of the feudal and semifeudal system and backward agricultural production to extract superprofits and plunder the Philippines of its wealth,” the CPP said.

The big landlords are the most trusted allies of foreign powers.

They continue to serve as suppliers of cheap raw materials and conduits of surplus products from the imperialist countries.

The clamor for genuine land reform remains the biggest democratic demand of the Filipino people.

“It is the main content of the people’s democratic revolution which seeks to correct the historic and social injustice inflicted on the peasant masses, and liberate them from feudal and semifeudal exploitation and oppression.

By carrying out genuine land reform in consonance with national industrialization, the full potential of the Philippine productive forces are unleashed,” the CPP said.

Under the auspices of the Pambansang Katipunan ng mga Magbubukid (PKM), an allied organization of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), the peasant masses are organized and mobilized to confront landlords with their demands to reduce land rent, raise wages of farm workers, bring down interest rates and raise farmgate prices.

http://tribune.net.ph/index.php/headlines/item/15332-cpp-gov-t-dominated-by-landlords-dooms-carp-under-noy