ANGELES CITY — As the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) gathered in Manila for a mid-year plenary assembly, farmers appealed to bishops “to reconsider their position” on the government’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).
In a two-page appeal to the CBCP, the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) said ”CARP is set to expire in 2014 and the Aquino administration, big landlords, and their special agents are now in chorus to again extend the anti-peasant law.”
The CBCP is supporting the government’s CARP and only blames so-called slow implementation, KMP said, noting that the program even became worse when it was amended into CARP with reforms or CARPer.
The government has distributed more public lands than lands of big landlords, the KMP told the CBCP.
“It is therefore urgent for all of us, the Filipino peasantry including our bishops, to unite and make a stand for a new, genuine and truly distributive land reform program.
We hope that the CBCP and the bishops reconsider their position on the sham CARPer and to continue taking the side of the oppressed and exploited toiling peasants who have been struggling for genuine land reform,” KMP Secretary General Antonio Flores said.
CBCP members from all over the country gathered Saturday for their mid-year plenary assembly at the Pope Pius Center in Manila where the KMP delivered their statement.
Flores cited “Hacienda Luisita as the symbol of CARP’s failure.”
“Hacienda Luisita is a testament to CARP’s failure in addressing landlessness, poverty, hunger, social injustice, oppression and deception in the country,” Flores said.
“The continuing land monopoly and control of a few landlord families show that the bogus CARP was not meant to break land monopoly and was instead implemented only to appease peasant unrest in the countryside and to create an illusion of land reform,” the KMP statement said.
He said “what the Department of Agrarian Reform and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources claim to have distributed are public lands and not the lands of big landlords. The government only acted as a landlord making farmers pay for these public lands,” the KMP said.
“These very same public lands paid by the supposed farmer-beneficiaries are being repossessed by the government itself to pave the way for so-called development and infrastructure project under the Public-Private Partnership program of the Aquino administration,” the KMP lamented.
The KMP cited as example ”the widespread land grabbing in Nueva Ecija, a pilot area of PD 27, in the form foreclosures.”
“For more than 40 years, the government’s agrarian reform is coupled with human rights violations. Farmers asserting their rights to the land are subjected to human rights abuses while agrarian struggles and peasant leaders are being criminalized, peasant leaders are incarcerated, and worse, farmers were massacred like the Escalante massacre in Negros, Lumil massacre in Silang, Cavite; Palo Massacre in Leyte; Mendiola Massacre, and Hacienda Luisita massacre, among others,” KMP said.
It also noted that “simultaneously, CARPer serves as a counter-insurgency program to drive away farmers from the militant life and death struggle for a genuine and truly distributive agrarian reform.”
“CARP is set to expire in 2014 and the Aquino administration, big landlords, and their special agents are now in chorus to again extend the anti-peasant law,” the KMP added.
