Aquino’s Land Reform Decree Draws Wrath of Estate Owners, Peasants

MANILA — Just a few hours after Philippine President Corazon Aquino signed a land-reform law that she labled “historic” and “comprehensive,” the leaders of 14 landowner organizations signed a protest declaration Wednesday, pledging to defend their estates with private armies or even to destroy their crops rather than cede them to the government.

On Thursday, the nation’s largest peasant organization, representing 800,000 tenant farmers, called Aquino’s decree “a death blow to millions of Filipinos hopes for a genuine agrarian reform” and a “sell-out” to the country’s wealthy, landed elite. The organization said that thousands of peasants will march in protest on Aquino’s presidential palace today.

Even members of Aquino’s own political party chided her Thursday for not going far enough in a decree that most analysts said was a watered-down compromise, which will anger far more Filipinos--leftists, rightists and moderates alike--than it will please.

Aquino’s edict ordered all of the nation’s centuries-old coconut, sugar, corn and rice estates broken up and sold to the tenant farmers tilling them.

“Mrs. Aquino’s proclamation is a compromise formula backed by a half-hearted political will,” political analyst Amando Doronila said. “While the proclamation describes the program as ‘comprehensive,’ the contents do not bear out the description.”

Doronila called Aquino’s edict “an emasculated version” of earlier, more ambitious proposals that had been submitted to the president.

For those who believe that the law does not go far enough, the key missing element is a specific ceiling on the amount of land that each hacienda owner would be permitted to retain.

Aquino’s own economic planning minister, Solita Monsod, had told reporters last month that any effective land-reform proclamation would have to set such a ceiling at about 17 acres, but Aqu1768845088details of the law’s implementation to the nation’s new Congress, which will convene for the first time on Monday.

There was, however, no criticism of the land-reform decree Thursday from Aquino’s Cabinet. The president said she would fire any minister who speaks out against it. When asked her opinion of the final proclamation Thursday, Monsod declined comment.

Another controversial element to Aquino’s decree is government financing for a program that is likely to cost billions of dollars. The Philippine government is already more than $27 billion in debt. A confidential World Bank study on an initial working draft of Aquino’s decree said the bank has grave doubts that the government could find the money needed to help tenant farmers buy the land.

In announcing her program, Aquino told reporters that she already has allocated 2.7 billion pesos (about $130 million) for the initial phase of the policy. The rest, Aquino has said in the past, will come from the sale of dozens of bankrupt corporations foreclosed on by government banks under former President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Only a handful of those assets have been sold in the 18 months that have passed since Aquino took power from Marcos in a civilian-backed military coup.

Even political analyst Luis Beltran, who said Thursday that Aquino showed “beyond dispute . . . that she is brave and courageous” in signing the decree, questioned the viability of a program funded “from government-seized companies nobody wants and the government itself can’t sell.”

What no one has questioned, however, is Aquino’s sincerity in announcing at least the framework of a land-reform program.

“My heart and soul are committed to making this agrarian reform program succeed,” she told reporters Thursday after a brief morning Cabinet meeting at which she signed the decree.

The president has pledged that her own 12,000-acre family sugar hacienda north of Manila, where about 5,000 peasants work as tenant farmers, will be broken up under the program, even if it means, Aquino said half-jokingly, that “at some point I will be brotherless and sisterless.”

Aquino, who owns only a one-sixth share in the plantation, added that she had discussed her policy with her relatives and her children.

“My brothers and sisters assured me that whatever I decide they will support me,” she said. “I have said time and again, whatever the law is, nobody is above the law, and that includes me.”

Aquino said she is confident that her version of the land-reform law will be supported by the new Congress, in which her party holds a solid majority. Most of the newly elected congressmen who commented on the decree, though, did not seem to give it much weight, insisting that the final law will be designed, drafted and implemented by the legislature.

Congressman from Aquino’s party were openly critical of the president’s decree. Aquino’s proclamation, said Bonifacio Gillego, who heads the land-reform committee in the House and represents a district where the nation’s Communist insurgency has been growing largely on the support of landless peasants, “was not comprehensive, not radical at all. It brings us back to square one.”

On Thursday, the political left made it clear it will not only continue to fight the Aquino administration on the land-reform issue but also intensify its anti-government campaign.

“The peasants’ fight for genuine land reform starts with the dismantling of the U.S.-Aquino regime,” declared Joel Rodriguez, deputy secretary general of the 800,000-member Filipino Farmers Movement, which condemned the law, in part because it also calls for 50,000 peasant families to immediately leave about 170,000 acres of government land they have illegally occupied.

Aquino’s decree is just the latest in a series of agrarian reform programs, all of which were declared “comprehensive” by the former presidents who tried to implement them over the decades. All have been designed to rectify a feudal land-ownership system implemented by Spanish colonial rulers in the 1500s.

The most recent attempt at land reform was launched by Marcos two days after he declared martial law and dissolved the nation’s legislature in 1972.

More than one million acres, planted in rice and corn, were given over to landless peasants under Marcos’ program. They bought the lands with the help of a government bond program that eventually failed. But Marcos also permitted his friends and associates to form virtual monopolies on coconut and sugar estates.

Political analyst Doronila, who, as editor of the Manila Chronicle, has been campaigning for months for a comprehensive land-reform law, said that Aquino’s program is even vaguer than Marcos’, particularly now that she is faced with an independent Congress that can change it.

“But it may also, on the assumption that Mrs. Aquino is a scheming politician, be laying a political trap for Congress,” Doronila added. “If the legislature, for example, truncates the program into a meaningless reform document, Mrs. Aquino could then go to the people and say, ‘Take your wrath out on Congress.’ ”