President Benigno Aquino III. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
BONGABONG, Oriental Mindoro—President Benigno Aquino III on Sunday assured the public that Malacañang would implement the Supreme Court ruling on the distribution of his family-owned Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac to its farm workers.
But the President said the task of the executive branch was “not clear” at this time because it had yet to get a “hard copy” of the high court ruling.
It was the first time Mr. Aquino spoke about the high court decision ordering the distribution of the sprawling sugar estate to farmer workers. The high court put the valuation of the land at P196 million.
“The Executive is prepared to enforce the law and to carry out the instructions of this decision,” he told reporters here at a resort where he attended the birthday celebration of his ally, Oriental Mindoro Governor Alfonso Umali.
He said it was under the watch of his mother, the late President Corazon Aquino, that the agrarian law was expanded and thus, it was her “flagship project.”
The President said that he and his family wanted the best for the tenant-farmers.
“By the time my family … terminates the relationship with the people who have been with us since 1958, our family wants to ensure that their situation was good and not bad. That is the desire from the start. And like any other citizen you want to be treated accordingly with fairness under our laws and under the Constitution,” Mr. Aquino said.
Gov’t impetus
In Manila, farmers and agrarian reform officials said the resolution of the Hacienda Luisita dispute, the largest estate that implemented a stock distribution option (SDO) for its workers, should provide an impetus for the government to finish the distribution of almost a million hectares of land that were placed under agrarian reform.
Agrarian Reform Undersecretary Anthony Parungao said about 900,000 hectares of land had yet to be distributed to beneficiaries two years before the end of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program’s (CARP) land acquisition phase.
The Supreme Court’s decision on Hacienda Luisita, which struck down the SDO as a mode of agrarian reform and gave the sugar estate to farmer workers, has given the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) “an additional impetus to work double time,” Parungao said.
No impediment
In November last year, 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 farm worker-beneficiaries under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law that was passed more than two decades ago under the late President Corazon Aquino.
Last week, the high court reaffirmed this decision and declared that the basis for land valuation was 1989.
“The decision is important because it sends a signal to the public that there is no longer a perceived impediment to the coverage,” Parungao said. The land acquisition and distribution “continue on many fronts,” he said.
He noted that the bulk of undistributed CARP lands were in 20 to 30 provinces. Parungao said Agrarian Reform Secretary Gil de los Reyes had ordered a review of the land distribution balance in these provinces to fast-track the distribution process.
The delays were due to legal issues and negligence on the part of local officials involved in the distribution, he said.
The Save the Agrarian Reform Alliance (Sara) and FARM-Luisita, one of the unions in the Tarlac plantation owned by Mr. Aquino’s family, said the DAR should also take advantage of the Supreme Court decision to resolve other problematic and big landholdings, and to review the other SDO schemes.
“The DAR should seriously cover other landholdings like Hacienda Matias in Negros Occidental and those in other parts of the Visayas and Mindanao,” said Jimmy Tadeo, a Sara official and a Presidential Agrarian Reform Council representative for Luzon.
Historic precedent
Makabayan, an umbrella group, said: “This should now be a historic precedent to dismantle other feudal plantations in the country.”
Since the late 1950s, Hacienda Luisita has been under the management of the Cojuangcos, Mr. Aquino’s relatives and among the most powerful political clans in the country.
The DAR has refused to comment on the effect of the Hacienda Luisita ruling on the remaining SDO cases. According to Parungao, the department had yet to read and study the decision. He explained that the November 2011 ruling declared that farmers cannot control the land under an SDO scheme, which is contrary to the intent of the CARP.
The department, he said, wanted to know if this decision was doctrinal—a decision that would cover other cases or limited only to Hacienda Luisita.
Since the 1990s, the DAR has allowed 13 plantations covering 7,700 ha to distribute stocks instead of land to their tenants.
Hacienda Luisita had the biggest SDO coverage at 4,900 ha, or 63 percent of the total area implementing some kind of SDO scheme.
Data from the DAR show that of the 13 estates, only two were not met by formal protests. The estate in Iloilo and another in Negros Occidental have no pending applications to revoke the SDO.
Since the Luisita case has been resolved by the Supreme Court, only about 10 SDO cancellation cases are pending at DAR. Most of the cases involve sugar plantations in Negros Occidental, according to the department.