Farmers to hold protest in Manila this week

MANILA, Philippines - Farmers will march to Manila this week to urge the Aquino government to continue the distribution of farmlands after the June 30 deadline of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program with Extension and Reforms (CARPER).

Farmers from various provinces, including 500 coconut farmers from Bondoc peninsula and Central Quezon, will join the march and are expected to arrive in Manila in the evening of June 7.

The Ateneans For Agrarian Reform Movement (AFARM) and the Buklod Atenista made a manifesto encouraging students and organizations to join their campaign to stand in solidarity with more than a million farmers who are yet to own the lands they have been tilling.

In their manifesto, AFARM and Buklod Atenista said that despite the five-year extension of land distribution through the passage of the CARPER Law in 2009, around 795,000 hectares of land have not yet been distributed as of February 2014.

Quezon farmers will begin their protest action with a program in Lucena tomorrow. They will then march to Sariaya to have a dialogue with the local government on their demand to formulate a new land use plan that protects poor coconut farmers.

On June 4, the Quezon farmers will proceed to San Pablo for a send-off mass to be officiated by Bishop Buenaventura Famadico of the Diocese of San Pablo. After that they will march to Calamba to merge with other farmers from the Visayas.  

The farmers will then go to Manila to protest the unfinished land distribution.

Many farmers from Quezon are land rights petitioners. They complained that the government has not yet formally recognized their rights even as CARPER will expire by the end of the month.

They are also protesting the reversal of land reform, particularly in Central Quezon where distributed farmlands are belatedly exempted from CARPER.

They are also campaigning against the planned allocation of eight million hectares of supposedly idle, untenured and unproductive lands to oil palm production, saying that there is a gross misappropriation of land amidst the need for increased food production and neglect of coconut production.

AFARM and Buklod Atenista also expressed dismay over the state of agrarian reform in the country, saying that there are unresolved cases of land grabbing and escalation of agrarian reform-related killings.

They added that in the provinces of Aurora and Pampanga in Luzon, Antique and Iloilo in the Visayas, and Surigao del Norte and South Cotabato in Mindanao, rural communities are being coercively dispossessed of the lands where they have resided for generations to make way for large-scale tourism, residential, free port and mining projects.

“AFARM and Buklod Atenista are fighting with farmers for the completion of land reform under CARPER, and against land-grabbing that reverses land reform,” they said.

“The Ateneans believe that realizing their right to land is necessary to attaining a society that is free from hunger, poverty and social inequity. Thus, fighting for life – for the lands that sustain the life of our society, and for the lives of farmers that till these lands for us,” they added.

AFARM is a student-led social justice task force of the Atenean community.

Buklod Atenista, on the other hand, is the alliance of the student governments of the Ateneo de Davao University, Ateneo de Manila University, Ateneo de Naga University, Ateneo de Zamboanga University, and Xavier University-Ateneo de Cagayan.