The recent Supreme Court decision on Hacienda Luisita has done two primary things: it is a debilitating setback to the struggle for land redistribution in the Cojuangco property , and second, it has given judicial imprimatur to the current policy framework in the Philippines that privileges corporate interests over the redress of historical wrongs against small-holder farmers.

A.      The setback to land redistribution

In its dispositive portion, the Supreme Court ordered the calling of a referendum to determine how many of the 6,296 qualified farm worker beneficiaries opt to remain as stockholders of HLI, and how many prefer actual distribution of land. It is truly galling to see how a democratic process like a referendum can be coopted in order to ratify a sham arrangement designed only to perpetuate elite interests. Referendums contemplate a free, informed choice – where the options and scenarios are known to the farmers, where the power asymmetries are not as manifest, and most importantly, where there are no pressures that bear upon the farmers to vote in a certain way.

The Supreme Court said that it “cannot be blind to the fact” that the farmers had agreed to the Stock Distribution Option when it was first proposed. What it is blind to is the universe of pressures that bear upon the small farmers of Hacienda Luisita, and the power asymmetries that undergird agrarian relations in the feudal Hacienda. The only viable situation for a referendum is when farmers come to the polling booths as new landowners, cognizant of agrarian reform and its possibilities, instead of a guileless mass made pliant by hunger and desperation.

Agrarian reform means land redistribution and meaningful control and management of the land by small farmers. It means nothing less. It is absurd for the Supreme Court to justify its position that agrarian reform does not just mean land redistribution by demonstrating how past experiences of land redistribution did not necessarily uplift the lives of farmers. Agrarian reform cannot be reduced to questions of economic efficiency alone. Redistribution is the constitutional and ethical imperative – issues of economic efficiency can be addressed by ensuring the redistribution is accompanied by a sustainable complementation of support services, not by discarding it as the core principle of agrarian reform.

B.      The privileging of corporate interests over land rights

We are likewise concerned that the Supreme Court decision will be, in essence, judicial legitimization of the already-alarming policy framework in the Philippines that privileges corporate interests over the valid assertions of small farmers. The Court could not have been more explicit in its statement that “a cooperative or cooperation stands in a better position to secure funding and competently maintain the agri-business than the individual farmer.” This position, when seen against the present contextual backdrop of farmers being transformed to wage labor and squeezed dry to generate more profits, of lands being used to service transnational corporations rather than ensure domestic food sovereignty, of titles being commodified and transacted in the market, creates long-term implications that will embolden the corporation even further and imperil the livelihoods of the small farmers even more. We anticipate that corporations, relying on the judicial pronouncements in Luisita, will come up with other “creative” strategies in order to avoid distribution and maintain the status quo.

The Luisita case is a blow for the farmers of Luisita, and a death-knell for small Filipino farmers who are, as it is, already working under adverse conditions. It demonstrates yet again how the marginalized are always held hostage to elite interests, and how the issue of land will always be embedded with issues of power and class.

We call on President Noynoy Aquino, in his triple capacity as President of the Republic of the Philippines, Chairperson of the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council, and scion of the landowners of Hacienda Luisita to,  at the soonest possible time, distribute the Luisita landholding — in land and not in stocks. No more sham referendums, no more “creative alternatives” to redistributive land reform.

PRESS STATEMENT
July 6, 2011

Farmworkers Agrarian Reform Movement (FARM)-Luisita – KATARUNGAN