(This article was originally published in the January-March 2019 issue of the Karapatan Monitor at the heels of a spate of killings of farmers and rights defenders in Negros)
All over the
Philippines, 207 peasants have already been killed as of March 31
since the start of the Duterte administration – 50 of the killings
occurred in Negros. Three of the 15 peasant massacres nationwide
happened in the island, claiming 29 out of 31 precious farmers’
lives.
People have come to
ask, why kill the hands that feed the nation? But another resounding
question is why Negros?
In May 2015, the
Aquino administration declared the entire island to be governed as
one administrative region, called Negros Island Region (NIR). But
President Duterte issued an executive order dissolving the NIR in
August 2017. The new dispensation does not have the budget for a
combined region, Duterte reasoned. What it does have apparently are
the resources for increased military deployment in the island which
Duterte ordered through Memorandum Order (MO) 32 issued on November
23, 2018. Since then, a total of 220 additional troops of the
Philippine Army from Panay island have been dispersed to several
battalions in Negros island.
Negros is the
country’s sugar bowl. In 2017, the island accounted for 59% of the
country’s total sugarcane production and 48% of the total area
harvested. Of the 27 operational mills in the country, 12 are in
Negros, which produced 63% of the country’s total raw sugar in
2018. But life in the island is bitter – poverty incidence is
consistently higher than the national figure. In 2015, national
poverty incidence was 16.5% of families, while it was 38.7% in Negros
Oriental and 21.9% in Negros Occidental. Negros Oriental had the
second highest huger incidence of 19.5% of families, next to Northern
Samar, and is consistently among the eight poorest provinces.
The Duterte
government has recently come up with the latest 2018 first semester
poverty statistics using ridiculously low poverty lines, but it has
failed just the same to sugar-coat the acute poverty situation of
Negros.
The dimension of
Negros’ poverty is classic – a colonial legacy of relegating a
resource-rich island to produce a single crop for export. This has
entrenched what may be considered as the most obstinate landlordism
in the country as well as the longest running mono cropping – both
have caused chronic economic, ecological, and social hardship for the
Negrenses.
Almost half (42%) of
the island’s total agricultural land planted to sugarcane. Negros
Occidental alone has 62% of its agricultural area devoted solely to
sugarcane. Mono cropping is the worst farming system – where only
one crop is grown in a tiempo (season)
in a large parcel of land. It requires the loss of natural habitats
and intensive use of large amounts of water and agro-chemicals,
posing severe loss of soil nutrients and other environmental
pollution, and in the case of sugarcane, only to cater to the global
market. This is why there are tiempos muertos (dead
season) when the harvested land, parched and idle, awaits the next
export orders, the next cropping season.
Majority,
or 85% of the sugar farmers are small farmers cultivating five
hectares or less, which comprise three fourths of the farms in the
island. But in terms of area, 64% is covered by farms of sizes 10% to
above 50 hectares. In terms of ownership, only 14% of landowners own
61% of the sugarlands.
The
island accounts for 21% of
the land acquisition and distribution (LAD) balance of 602,306
hectares under the three-decades-old Comprehensive Agrarian Reform
Program (CARP). Negros has the second lowest distribution
accomplishment rate in the country, next
only to the Autonmous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
Department
of Agrarian Reform (DAR) land inventory shows that certificate of
land ownership awards (CLOAs) both for individual and collective
agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) cover 59% of the island’s
agricultural land. It doesn’t indicate, however, whether the ARBs
have indeed been installed. A Negros Occidental provincial government
survey showed in 2008 that 41% of the ARBs were no longer in
possession of their land, a figure that jumped to 70% by 2013.
What
is clear is that the government has introduced various schemes –
corporative, contract growing,
leaseback arrangements, stock distribution option (SDO), and block
farming – to consolidate the farms to 30-50 hectares and maintain
the ‘economy of scale’ for sugarcane production. These schemes
have effectively re-concentrated the land to the landlords and
dispossessed farmers not only of the resource but also of the
decision on what to produce. Eleven of the 13 SDOs are in Negros. As
of 2018, 21 of the 26 accredited block farms are in Negros.
Sugar
farmers and farm workers including mill workers are among the poorest
sections of the Philippine peasantry. Aside from having been
dispossessed of land, they receive the lowest wage rates and no
benefits while doing back-breaking and hazardous work. Their agrarian
struggles are intense, especially in the backdrop of massive
landlessness and tiempos muertos, which have culminated in direct
actions of land occupation and cultivation for their very survival –
called bungkalan by
the organized peasantry. Negros farmers have waged the most number of
bungkalan in the country. And for the government, the land-owning
elite, sugar barons, and the military – bungkalan and the Negros
farmers’ struggles are the source of conflict that need to be
decimated.
