Filipino Landlessness: Recipe for Violence

Once again the almost feudal distribution of Philippine farmland has been highlighted by the tragic killing of 12 of the 10,000 farmers demonstrating for land reform in front of Manila’s Malacanang Palace.

The Philippines now is one of a short list of countries having a substantial proportion of landless families--tenants and agricultural laborers--but not yet experiencing either massive revolution or voluntary land reform.

Many other countries with similar proportions of landless families have, during this century, already undergone upheavals in which the landless peasants provided the rank-and-file for the revolutionary forces. These include the momentous civil conflicts in Mexico, Russia, Spain, China, Vietnam and Cuba. But other countries, such as Taiwan and South Korea, found nonviolent solutions to peasant grievances through large-scale land reforms undertaken under government sponsorship.

For years the agricultural laborers on Philippine sugar and coconut plantations, and the tenant farmers renting small plots of rice and corn land, have provided the grass-roots support for that country’s guerrilla movements--first the Hukbalahaps and now the Communist New People’s Army. The guerrillas’ appeal has steadily increased, with the latest indications that the NPA fields 16,000 to 23,000 troops and controls villages in which roughly 17% of all Filipinos live.

Landlessness in the Philippines has been a recipe for low productivity and increasing violence. Despite the fact that “miracle rice” was first developed in the Philippines, the yields per acre on its largely tenanted rice holdings are half or less the yields attained by Japan, Taiwan and South Korea--countries in which nearly all rice farmers own the land that they cultivate, thanks to major postwar land reforms.

Paradoxically, if the NPA wins, not only will it mean enormous violence and suffering for Filipinos, and the loss of democracy, but probably the collectivization of the land as well--an end result that the peasants prefer to landlessness but clearly hold inferior to owning their own land, and one that likely would keep productivity at much lower levels than could be achieved with small owner-operated farms.

Roughly 2 1/2 million agricultural families in the Philippines are landless--divided about equally between desperate agricultural laborers and impoverished tenant farmers. They make up more than half the agricultural population and a quarter or more of the country’s entire population. For 30 years successive regimes, both democratic and authoritarian, have promised land reform, but none have effectively delivered on that promise.

As the guerrillas have grown stronger, however, some in the land-owning elite have begun rethinking their longstanding opposition to reform. Their increasing schizophrenia is reflected in President Corazon Aquino’s own case. Her late husband, Benigno S. Aquino, redistributed his family lands to tenant farmers, while his wife’s side of the family thus far has resisted any reform on its 15,000-acre sugar estate. But any general acceptance of reform by the elite hinges on the ability to make some reasonable compensation for the land taken. And “up-front” compensation resources would have to be found by the government, which is nearly broke.

Time clearly is running out. The United States can help by strongly urging the Aquino regime to act quickly to implement laws already on the books for the redistribution of rice and corn land to tenant farmers. It also should urge the Philippine government to add at least small-scale land-redistribution schemes on sugar-cane and coconut plantations (replicating voluntary land-sharing measures already under way on 30 sugar haciendas).

To make these urgings more cogent and effective, Administration and congressional leaders should tell the Aquino government that they will support an additional $200-million aid appropriation for the Philippines in 1987, as in 1986--but that this time it will be earmarked exclusively to finance major land-reform measures.