This land is mine

The title is from the film “Exodus” that depicts the struggle of the Israelis after World War II to take-over the land in Palestine, which they claimed is their inheritance from Abraham. Palestine was then under British rule. The Palestinians, of course, opposed this effort because as it turned out they were dispossessed or removed from the land that the United Nations assigned to the Jews in the partition of the country.

In a letter published in the community dailies the other week and furnished this column, a letter writer, Fernando Hernandez bewailed the taking over of agricultural farms by the government and distributing them to tenants or in the case of sugar farms, to the workers.

This is an old issue in fact the national debate in the 1980s after Corazon Aquino was propelled to the presidency led to the heated discussions on this plan to takeover productive lands for distribution to the landless. The opposition by the landowners failed to stay the hand of Aquino. She was too popular and she controlled the legislature despite the elections. Those identified with the Marcos regime were defeated and she was beyond question.

The military uprisings against her administration failed because the people were too mesmerized by the yellow color and believed the myth that Cory Aquino could do no wrong.

Hernandez’ letter focused on sugar farms although he cited the case of lands devoted to other agricultural crops. We had been harping on the zero-tariff on sugar imports by 2015 but Hernandez contends that “by 2004 the Tariff rates will be brought down on most agricultural commodities”.

Although he is sometimes unclear the point he made is that Philippine products “would be competing against the large agricultural conglomerates of Australia and Thailand.”

We have cited this danger time and again but we hear only silence from government because from a political perspective this means cheaper products and that makes the consumers happy. Restricting or stopping the entry of cheaper agricultural products would be political suicide.

Sure, as Hernandez points out, the cheap food is only “in the short term” and “sacrifices two of the nation’s major building blocks: employment and food security.” But do people really care?

The absence of a national outcry against the impeding threats (two years from now for some and three years for other agricultural products) shows that people do not care. There was greater interest in the impeachment of Renato Corona and the stand-off in the Scarborough Shoal than on what  happens when the tariff drops to zero.

In fact, the countdown had started with gradual reduction of the tariff until it drops to almost nothing.

The Hernandez letter cited the rising concern for food security, the bidding for food supply already becoming stiffer.

But we must face reality – the government wants to import because there is money there and nothing (for themselves) from improving our food stock.

He is right in claiming that other countries are subsidizing their agriculture that allows them to produce at cheaper cost. However, we must also consider that the existence of subsidy means that their cost of production is high – they can sell cheap only because their own consumers are paying high prices.

Here is something interesting in Hernandez letter - he claims there are approximately 10 million hectares of arable agricultural lands in the Philippines out of which 8 million had already been distributed under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.

He rightly compared our agriculture with that of our neighbors and the poor investment portfolio on agriculture. One of the main stumbling blocks is the CARP that prevents banks from lending for agricultural expansion and development, except for export crops.

While he admits that CARP is a social legislation he criticizes it “because it rides on a quasi form of social justice” and that “taking land from one person in favor of another is wrong on all levels even if the other person is impoverished.”

He adds “the truth is that there is a level of qualification and responsibility to owning land. There are special skills needed to farm and the land that go beyond knowing how to plow the field.”

While he is right about not taking Pedro’s land to give to Juan because Juan is poor, Hernandez claim of skills “beyond knowing how to plow a field” smacks of landlord aristocracy that limits the productivity of the land to those who do not plow and they alone can declare “this land is mine.”

The failure of CARP I wrote earlier is not distribution per se or that the beneficiaries are of limited knowledge but that they were abandoned to fend for themselves. The government took the land of those who make land productive and gave it to people who could have made them productive had they been helped.*

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