BACOLOD CITY – Thousands of poor and landless Negros peasants took a day off from their backbreaking work in haciendas to seek divine assistance on during the feast of San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmers.
“We pray for an end to landlords’ greed that has caused widespread poverty and misery among peasants. We also ask divine intervention in convincing our lawmakers to immediately pass legislations that will extend and overhaul the implementation of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. Buksan po sana ninyo ang kanilang puso at isipan upang maisulong ang hustisya para sa mga aping mangunguma,” said Alberto Jayme, Negros chapter president of the national peasant federation Task Force Mapalad (TFM).
Carrying images of the patron saint of farmers and offerings of vegetable and fruit harvests, some of which were loaded in a cart pulled by a carabao, the farmers marched from the TFM office in Bacolod to the San Isidro Labrador Parish Church in the village of Tangub to hear Mass officiated by Bishop Vicente Navarra. The farmers also attended another Mass in the city’s San Sebastian Cathedral.
The activity, dubbed “Mass and March for Land and Justice,” also included a program held in front of the Fountain of Justice at the old City Hall where farmers spoke of their sufferings due to landlessness nearly three decades after the CARP implementation and amid the non-passage of House Bill 4296 and House Bill 4375.
HB 4296 seeks to renew the DAR’s authority to issue notices of coverage and provide adequate funding for support services to agricultural landholdings that have not yet been placed under the CARP. And HB 4375 seeks to create an independent Agrarian Reform Commission to review the actual accomplishment of CARP and investigate circumventions and violations of the CARP Law with a view to cause those landholdings to be redistributed to qualified beneficiaries.
TFM farmers carried out the activity a month before the House of Representatives’ schedule to pass on third and final reading HB 4296 after President Benigno Aquino in March, gave marching orders to his allies in Congress to complete the CARP.
“We are hoping for the best. But we can’t just sit down and wait for HB 4296’s passage even when there’s already an instruction from the President,” said Jayme.
“The landlord-politicians’ strong resistance to CARP and how the program’s implementation was stalled, blocked, or watered down in the past by lawmakers and their allies, who want to control vast tracks of agricultural landholdings, give us reason to remain vigilant and continue pressing for CARP’s completion and overhaul,” he added.
Just recently, foreign business groups, under the European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines, were reported to have been planning to submit to President Aquino an updated list of proposed measures that the groups think will hone the reform focus of the current administration as it enters the homestretch.
Among the foreign business groups’ proposed so-called reforms is the non-extension of the CARP by countering HB 4296’s passage.
“We are grateful for having Aquino as our ally. But many lawmakers and their allies are still finding ways to kill CARP and mire us in poverty, hunger, and slavery. But we remain optimistic because we know that not only the President but the Almighty, who is a God of justice, is also on our side. God will not allow oppression to persist in the lands that that were promised to its tillers through the agrarian reform program,” said Jayme.
Based on April 15, 2015 data from the DAR, some 15,391 landholdings nationwide with a total area of 164,156 hectares have not yet been issued CARP notices of coverage (NOC), the first of the many steps in acquiring and distributing lands to farmer-beneficiaries of the program.
Nearly 26,000 hectares or about 16 percent of the landholdings without NOC are found in Negros Occidental.
More than 700,000 hectares of agricultural landholdings nationwide are not yet awarded to farmer-beneficiaries of the CARP. Nearly 130,000 hectares or about 18 percent of the said CARP balance are found in Negros Occidental. (TFM)
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