“While we welcome Duterte’s unilateral ceasefire declaration with the CPP-NPANDF, it should translate to the demilitarization of rural communities and the countryside,” said KMP chair Joseph Canlas.
Canlas said the Armed Forces of the Philippines should “immediately pull out its troops, abandon our community schools and barangay halls and dismantle military detachments from our farm lands.”
Canlas also lamented the failure of the President to cite in his SONA measures to implement genuine land reform. “The lack of any presidential directive on land reform is a call to farmers to mainly rely on the peasant mass movement and struggle including the peace negotiations, in their assertion of their right to the lands,” Canlas noted.
Before the President’s SONA, the Anakpawis partlist also expressed hope that the President would give importance to his administration’s agrarian reform priority.
“The legitimate demands of the masses remain as ‘Land, Wages, Jobs, Shelter and Basic Rights,’ which are by-product of genuine land reform and nationalist industrialization. Hence, we urge the President to draft his political and economic agenda by these framework,” Analpawis said in a statement.
Anakpawis recalled that Duterte, during the presidential campaign, “promised agricultural development, free irrigation services for the farmers, the return of the multi-billion-peso coconut levy fund to the farmers, the banning of contractualization of labor and stop to demolition of urban poor communities if there is no relocation.”
