Farmers set protest march on capital

FILE PHOTOS courtesy of Bulatlat Multimedia

LUCENA CITY, Philippines—-A coalition of farmers’ groups in Quezon has called on peasant groups across the country to march on Manila in June, when the extended Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) is scheduled to end.

In a phone interview, Jansept Geronimo, spokesperson of Kilusan Para sa Tunay na Repormang Agraryo at

Katarungan Panlipunan (Katarungan)-Quezon, said the farmers would “rock Malacañang, the (Department of Agrarian Reform), Congress and the Senate” with protests for their failure to fully implement a genuine agrarian reform program.

Geronimo said that like the farmers’ Alliance of Land Rights Movement in Mindanao (Alarm-Mindanao), which started its march from Cagayan de Oro City to Manila on May 26, the Quezon coalition would conduct a similar protest march in behalf of Quezon’s Bondoc Peninsula, one of the agrarian reform hot spots in Southern Tagalog.

Geronimo said farmers here continued to be harassed with “petty court suits, death threats and killer bullets.” Six farmer leaders had been been killed in the Bondoc Peninsula allegedly due to agrarian conflict, while some 400 criminal cases, mostly for theft of coconuts, had been filed against more than 300 tenants, according to records of the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Bondoc Peninsula.

Meanwhile, restive coconut farmers from Quezon plan to seek a dialogue with Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) Chair Andres Bautista for an update on the status of the multibillion-peso coco levy fund, and the government’s plan for its disposition.

Quezon farmers were believed to have been the biggest contributors to the coco levy fund exacted from them from 1973 to 1982 during the martial law regime under dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The levy, claimed its proponents, was meant to develop the country’s coconut industry.

The recovered fund, estimated to be around P70 billion, is expected to benefit more than 20 million coconut farmers and their families from more than 21,000 coconut-producing villages across the country.

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