CITY OF SAN FERNANDO – The so-called Hacienda Binay in Rosario, Batangas is yet another “evidence” of the failure of the expired Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).
In a statement yesterday, the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) also accused businessman Antonio Tiu of being “a local conduit in global land-grabbing.”
Tiu has been claiming ownership of the hacienda, but some senators probing the hacienda case have insisted he was merely the dummy of Vice Pres. Jejomar Binay.
“The agribusiness park in Rosario, Batangas allegedly owned by the Binays is a classic example of the sham CARP’s failure to break landlords’ monopoly of lands. It is among the numerous haciendas like Pres. Aquino’s Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac, Hacienda Roxas in Nasugbu also in Batangas, Araneta Estate in Bulacan, Hacienda Dolores in Pampanga, and Danding Cojuangco’s haciendas in Negros and Mindanao, among others, that the CARP failed to distribute,” KMP Chair Rafael Mariano said.
Mariano said the CARP, enacted during the time of the late President Corazon Cojuangco- Aquino and expired last June 30 “was purposely designed by the Cojuangco family to evade land distribution and strengthen the control of big landlords and agribusiness corporations over vast tracts of lands.”
“The bogus CARP and the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) allowed the widespread land-grabbing, land-use conversion, re-concentration of vast tracts of lands, and land reform reversals, like in the case of the so-called Hacienda Binay,” Mariano said.
He noted that “only a genuine agrarian reform program that will nationalize all agricultural lands and subsequently distribute lands to the tillers will put an end to the monopoly of lands of big landlords.” The KMP also accused Tiu, owner and chief executive officer of AgriNurture Inc. (ANI), as behind “big ticket land-grabbing in the country.”
It cited GRAIN, a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community- controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, as describing Tiu as “a local conduit in global land-grabbing.”
KMP noted a documentation by GRAIN noting Tiu’s ANI firm partnered in 2012 with the Chinese firm Beidahuang in search for 10,000 hectares for hybrid rice production and that Tiu’s firm has also forged ties with other Chinese firms for some 50,000 hectares of land for the production of fruits and cereals in Mindanao.
It also quoted GRAIN as reporting that “With more and more land under its control, ANI has itself become a target of overseas farmland investors. In 2011, Cargill’s hedge fund, Black- River, which is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the acquisition of farms in Latin America and Asia, bought a 28 percent stake in AgriNurture.”
The KMP also said that “land-grabbing by big agribusinesses transnational proliferated under the bogus CARP” as it noted a study stating that “some 1.2 million hectares are under agribusiness contracts and that leasehold farmers have increased from 555,232 in 1988 to 1,216,430 in 2012.”
“Lands under leasehold arrangements increased from 582,476 hectares in 1988 to 1,740,345 hectares in 2012.
Millions of farmers are still under contract agreements with plantation owners and agribusiness corporations, many of which contracts are disadvantageous to the interests of farmers and farm workers,” the KMP said.
