UMA condemns military for tagging Negros agricultural workers as rebels

The Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (UMA) condemns Brigadier General Eliezer Losañes, 303rd commanding officer of the Philippine Army for stating that agricultural workers and farmers who are asserting their rights to their lands through Land Cultivation Areas (LCA) in Negros Occidental as rebels.

According to John “Butch” Milton Lozande, secretary general of UMA, the general’s statement is like that of despotic hacienderos who have for centuries lorded it over the sugar industry in Negros at the expense of the sweat and blood of sugar workers. That is the reason why Negros has been described as a social volcano waiting to explode.

Even the Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) reports that of the 424,130 hectares of sugar lands in Negros Island, 33.99% of these are lands with 50 hectares or more owned by only 1,860 big landlords (hacienderos), 30% with 10 to 50 hectares are owned by just 6,820 big and small landlords, and the majority of 53,320 farmers and agricultural workers only own 36% of the sugar lands.

At the same time, in 2007 the Negros Occidental Provincial Government conducted a survey, in which it was found that 41% of Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries (ARBs) in the province are no longer in possession of the lands awarded to them (25,336 out of 61,375 ARBs surveyed) due mainly to lack of support services and non-land support facilities that forced ARBs to lease their land.

The National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW) which is a member of UMA estimates that this figure has reached 70% this year. While CARP implementation was only at 40%.

Sugar workers in haciendas (plantations), on the average, receive a measly P500 to P750 weekly wages all year round. Minimum wage is pegged at only P245 per day for the farm workers but in many haciendas, P80-P120 a day is still prevalent.

Not less than 93% of workers in haciendas engage in “pakyaw system” that provides meager income resulting to ARBs not being able to have adequate food on their table and send their children to school. Many also have no SSS and other government-mandated benefits.

This is the reason why the NFSW and Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP)-Negros launched the Land Cultivation Area (LCA) or “bungkalan” campaign, especially among sugar workers who have to endure the tiempo muerto (dead season) which lasts for up to five months.

As NFSW has stated quite clearly, the goal of setting up land cultivation areas is to ward off the inevitable hunger brought by the Tiempo Muerto on properties covered by agrarian reform but which remain undistributed and idle, planting these with vegetables, banana, corn and root crops to feed their families.

So if the military under Brigadier General Eliezer Losañes or whoever from this fascist institution wants to unleash the wrath of the social volcano in Negros, let them.

NFSW was never cowed, even when martial law was declared in 1972. It even grew stronger despite numerous human rights violations inflicted on their members, including the Escalante massacre. It is not cowed with the military’s dangerous remarks on its LCA’s and it will always prevail together with the rest of the Filipino peasantry and its allied masses against oppression and exploitation.

Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura

Federation of Agricultural Workers | Philippines