Still landless farmers seek officials’ ouster

Environment Secretary Ramon Paje (left) and Agrarian Reform Secretary Virgilio de los Reyes: Under pressure. INQUIRER.net FILE PHOTOS

LUCENA CITY, Philippines—A farmers’ group in Quezon has urged President Aquino to fire the secretaries of the Departments of Agrarian Reform and Environment and Natural Resources, and replace them with officials “who could carry out a fair and equitable land distribution.”

Kilusan para sa Tunay na Repormang Agraryo at Katarungang Panlipunan (Katarungan)-Quezon spokesman Jansept Geronimo said Agrarian Reform Secretary Virgilio de los Reyes and Environment Secretary Ramon Paje should be replaced as “both have failed to carry out the government land reform program.”

“The replacement should not only adhere to the tenets of ‘tuwid na daan’ (straight path) but, more importantly, have the sincerity and courage to implement the true spirit of land reform—‘that every landless farmer should have a piece of land to call his own,’” Geronimo said in a phone interview on Thursday.

Urgent measure

Geronimo said Katarungan welcomed Aquino’s certification of House Bill No. 4296 as an urgent measure that had to be immediately passed by Congress to ensure the success of the Land Acquisition and Distribution (LAD) program under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

In a letter to Speaker Feliciano Belmonte, President Aquino certified HB 4296 as an urgent measure, saying its passage would ensure the “fair and equitable”distribution of land to farmers.

HB 4296, authored by Ifugao Rep. Teddy Baguilat of the Liberal Party, aims to extend the LAD program up to 2016 to give the DAR more time to issue notices of coverage for more than 600,000 hectares of CARP-covered lands.

The CARP is set to expire on June 30.

Geronimo said the true success of the government land reform program rested on the immediate distribution of land to the landless and the grant to the beneficiaries of all the support needed to make the lands productive.

Hotbeds of conflict

“If the LAD program will only remain in newspapers and self-serving press releases, this administration is only fooling the people,” he said.

Quezon province’s Bondoc Peninsula continues to be one of the hotbeds of agrarian conflict in Southern Tagalog. Several killings of farmer leaders in the past had been attributed to the agrarian conflict.

De los Reyes led in the distribution of certificate of land ownership awards covering 480 hectares in Mulanay town in February last year.

The DAR promised more land distribution but none has place, according to Katarungan.

Worse, big landowners in the area are fencing their properties to stop agrarian reform beneficiaries from taking possession of the lands that had been awarded to them under the government agrarian reform program.

The land reform program was initiated by the President’s mother, President Corazon Aquino, in June 1988 as a 10-year program that was extended for another 10 years, or up to 2008. In August 2009, then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo extended it another five years, or until June 2014.