‘Luisita ruling gives other tillers hope’
The Supreme Court decision to strike down the stock distribution option (SDO) scheme at Hacienda Luisita, the largest plantation in the Philippines to implement the mechanism, has given some hope to farmers opposing the SDO on 10 other large estates around the country.
Danny Carranza, secretary general of Katarungan, said the Luisita decision has given the farmers the ammunition to challenge SDO schemes in other plantations.
The Department of Agrarian Reform said there were about 7,700 hectares of land in 13 haciendas that had resorted to the SDO.
Hacienda Luisita, the vast Tarlac sugar estate owned by the Cojuangco side of President Aquino’s family, had the biggest SDO coverage, at 4,900 ha, or 63 percent of the total hectarage implementing some kind of SDO scheme.
The second biggest estate to exercise the SDO is the Ledesma Hermanos Agricultural Corp., a 1,000-ha sugar plantation in Negros Occidental.
Carranza said the ruling should pave the way for the distribution of other disputed estates to farmer tenants because with the Luisita SDO ruling, “there is no more reason why the SDO should be permitted.”
Precedent for other areas
Lani Factor, of Task Force Mapalad, said the Luisita ruling should set a precedent for other areas that were placed under the SDO scheme. TFM is working with the farmers of Hacienda Anita in Negros Occidental for the revocation of the SDO scheme in the plantation. The case is still pending before the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council (PARC).
“The ruling has a great implication and hopefully this becomes a precedent,” Factor said. As in Hacienda Luisita, the farmers in Hacienda Anita do not own majority of the shares of the land, she said.
She said there had been violations of the agreement which the farmers protested to DAR in 2004 but the issue had remained unresolved.
The Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) said the Luisita decision should fast-track the revocation of other SDO schemes.
The group noted that the SDO was established to give landowners a way to skirt the provisions of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL) and avoid the actual distribution of land to farmers.
The DAR should speed up the pending SDO appeals and distribute the land to the farmers, the KMP, Katarungan and TFM said.
On Nov. 22, the Supreme Court ordered the management of Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI) to distribute 4,915.75 ha of the sugar estate to 6,296 registered farmworker-beneficiaries in accordance with the CARL passed more than two decades ago under President Aquino’s mother, the late President Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino.
The high court also voided the SDO scheme being implemented by Hacienda Luisita, saying this had not benefited the farmers who had been working the land for generations.
While the landmark ruling did not declare that the SDO was unconstitutional, it did clarify what it means to have control over the land in the context of the country’s agrarian reform laws.
The high court said “the policy on agrarian reform is that control over agricultural lands must always be in the hands of the farmers.”
Potential future weapon
Another potential future weapon in the farmers’ arsenal is the dissenting opinion of Chief Justice Renato Corona, who did not go along with the majority’s decision not to rule on the constitutionality of the SDO, which he said was “unconstitutional.”
Agrarian Reform Secretary Virgilio de los Reyes said he expects the lawyers for the farmers with pending SDO protests to cite the Luisita ruling. “As any Supreme Court decision, it becomes law,” he said.
He said Corona’s dissenting opinion could also be used to annul the other SDO schemes.
Since the 1990s, the DAR allowed 13 plantations covering 7,700 ha to distribute stocks instead of land to their tenant farmers under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).
According to data from the DAR, of the 13 estates, only two haciendas were not met by formal protests. These two estates, one in Iloilo and another in Negros Occidental, have no pending applications to revoke the SDO.
Since the Luisita case had been resolved by the Supreme Court, only about 10 SDO cancellation cases were pending at the DAR. Most of the cases involve sugar plantations in Negros Occidental.
Meanwhile, a party-list member of the House, Rafael Mariano (Anakpawis), has rebuked Mr. Aquino for saying that the Cojuangcos of Luisita should be compensated for the loss of their estate.
Milking cow since 1957
“Since 1957, the Cojuangco-Aquino clan has made a milking cow out of the Hacienda Luisita sugar estate and amassed wealth by exploiting farmers and farmworkers. It is the height of callousness that President Benigno Simeon Aquino III [should] demand land compensation for his extended family,” Mariano said.
He denounced the President for speaking “as if his family was shortchanged or disadvantaged” by the high court.
“In case he has forgotten, the Cojuangco-Aquinos repeatedly evaded actual land distribution for the past five decades through antifarmer, state-sponsored agrarian reform programs,” he said. With a report from TJ Burgonio
First posted 12:41 am | Sunday, November 27th, 2011
