Comprehensive agrarian economy

ABy 2006 Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) study, all of 270 pages, funded by the German Technical Cooperation entitled “The Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program: Scenarios and Options of Future Development” concludes with the following: 1) Philippine agriculture is in a “state of distress; 2) Despite 18 years of CARP and 14 years of ‘Operation Land Transfer’ (PD 27), agrarian reform has failed to produce a significant dent on the country’s rural poverty levels; 3) Despite having spent over R200 B for CARP, the financing is still inadequate; 4) Implementation has been beset by misplaced priorities and misallocation of scarce resources; 5) The collection record of CARP amortization payments has been a dismal 18%; 6) Globalization has had a negative effect on agriculture: worldwide economic trends, like trade liberalization, increasing prices of fertilizers and crude oil, have seriously hurt Philippine agriculture; 7) The agriculture trade balance has been a clear deteriorating trend since the enactment of CARP with the Philippines changing from a net agricultural exporter to a net agricultural importer by the mid-1990s.

Attorneys Eduardo Hernandez, Gil Marie Alba, and Adriano Hernandez, in their book, “Landowner’s Rights,” state, “DAR’s campaign to extend CARP, blaming ‘extraneous variables’ other than CARP” is an attempt at justification. They continue: “This finger pointing is suspicious and dangerous because an honest evaluation of CARP should evaluate first, whether there is anything wrong with it, rather than pointing the blame elsewhere.” Further, “Indeed it seems strange that foreigners should take special interest in helping our agrarian reform program, which is supposed to improve our agricultural productivity, and enable us to compete with their highlyprotected agricultural sectors. And we were known to be a major agricultural power in the world economy before agrarian reform.”

We can conclude that the intent of foreign interest is a “comprehensive agrarian economy” out of touch and outpaced by a world order heavily industrialized.

Maoist-left sectors and those in DAR are ideologically focused on igniting rural restiveness vs. landowners copying China’s Mao’s revolutionary struggle from the countryside. It is ironic, that the end-objective of said belief is “State title and control of all lands,” as in present China. The three authors cited, assert: “The general misimpression is that agrarian reform must necessarily be anti-landowner, or must necessarily be part of class struggle. This view of agrarian reform fails to see that in the countries that agrarian reform became a successful vehicle for change, industrialization, and farmer emancipation, landowners took an active part in accomplishing the nation’s socio-economic objectives. The Philippine species of agrarian reform was not meant as a means of perpetrating an ideology…but to become a serious player in global economy, not only in agriculture but also in industry.”