What Went Before: Distributing Luisita land to farmer beneficiaries

More than a year after the Supreme Court’s final ruling on the Hacienda Luisita case, some 4,000 hectares of the estate (shown in photo) have been titled to the government, paving the way for the distribution of the land to farmworkers. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—More than a year after the Supreme Court’s final ruling on the Hacienda Luisita case, some 4,000 hectares of the estate have been titled to the government, paving the way for the distribution of the land to farmworkers.

Beneficiaries wanted the distribution to take place before President Aquino’s State of the Nation Address on Monday, July 22.

However, Agrarian Reform Secretary Virgilio de los Reyes was quoted as saying in a July 6 Inquirer report that the revalidation of a survey done on Hacienda Luisita was delaying actual distribution.

He added that the distribution of some 4,000 ha of land to 6,212 beneficiaries would start “in the next few days.”

The survey is part of the process of distributing the land, which the Supreme Court ordered in its April 2012 ruling that upheld with finality the decision of the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council in 2005 to scrap the stock distribution option (SDO) of Hacienda Luisita.

The SDO is a scheme under the 1988 Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) that allows workers to own shares of stock instead of land. Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI) was the first corporation to employ the stock option in 1989.

In 2003, Hacienda Luisita farmers, claiming that the SDO failed to uplift their living conditions, filed a petition in the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) to revoke the arrangement.

In 2004, violence erupted during a strike at the hacienda that left seven persons dead. The deaths focused national attention on the plight of the workers and led the DAR to cancel the SDO a year later.

In 2006, a temporary restraining order was issued by the Supreme Court after HLI raised the issue to the tribunal.

Referendum

In 2010, a compromise deal, which promised a P150-million financial package for the beneficiaries, was signed by HLI and various unions in the estate.

Farmers lined up in August 2010 to receive their share of the P20-million first installment of the financial settlement. The balance of the package, HLI said, would be released once the Supreme Court approved the compromise deal.

However, in July 2011, the high court upheld the DAR’s revocation of the SDO and called for a referendum to allow farmers to vote again on whether they want land ownership or shares of stock.

In another ruling, issued in November 2011, the court rescinded the SDO and voted 14-0 to distribute the hacienda.

In April, De los Reyes expressed confidence that the agency would “meet its self-imposed deadline of distributing the land to qualified beneficiaries in Hacienda Luisita by the middle of this year.”

The agency said it was progressing smoothly after the completion of two crucial stages in the process of distributing the land: the identification of qualified beneficiaries and the segregation survey in the country’s biggest sugar estate owned by President Aquino’s family.

Identifying beneficiaries

However, De los Reyes said that the process of identifying the farmer-beneficiaries took up a significant amount of time and resources, and the agency had to deploy additional personnel from various regional offices to accomplish the task.

Based on a recent report to the Supreme Court on the distribution of land, the DAR has contracted the services of the surveying firm F.F. Cruz and Co. in order to facilitate the distribution of land, complete the aerial photography of the hacienda and transform the aerial photos into scaled mosaic plans. The date was used as the basis for the field work on the segregation survey.—Inquirer Research

Source: Inquirer Archives