Beyond land

The two (2) questions for this article are:
· Is agrarian reform still a relevant requisite for Philippine development?
· Why has the Philippines failed to industrialise?

Quick answers
The first book that was used as reference for this article, the one written by James Putzel, was published in 1992, more than fourteen (14) years ago. Putzel’s answer to the question at that time was:

Redistributive agrarian reform could make a major contribution to future development and peace in the Philippines, primarily by strengthening the foundations of civil society. (Putzel 1992, p. 381)

Putzel made a distinction between two (2) general types of agrarian reform: a reform that focused on agricultural productivity (conservative approach) and one that emphasised redistribution of the principal resource in agriculture, land (revolutionary and liberal approaches). His bias seems to lie in the latter approaches, specifically the liberal approach.
So to him, at the time of the publication of his book A captive land: politics of Agrarian reform in the Philippines in 1992, agrarian reform was still very much relevant, with the redistributive agenda at the core of the agrarian reform programme, that is.

Rivera (1994), for his part, saw agrarian reform as key to industrialization. In the book Landlords and capitalists: class, family and state in Philippine manufacturing, Rivera pointed out that agrarian reform[i] is key in raising mass incomes and creating a strong internal market that would have allowed the Philippines to make the leap towards sustained production of intermediate and capital goods (industrialization).

Rivera wrote the book above in 1994, twelve (12) years ago and just six (6) years after the enactment of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL). It is now twenty (20) years since the enactment of CARL and the implementation of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) and yet the Philippines is still not an industrialised or even an industrialising country.

The figures on the accomplishments of CARP are confusing. DAR (2007) claims that 6.95 million hectares of land has been distributed, representing 76% accomplishment out of the 9.12 million hectares of land under the coverage of the programme. It is not clear how many of the estimated 4 million families[ii] dependent on agriculture benefited from the programme, out of the estimated twelve (12) million households in the country.

Failure to industrialise
At present, if we explore the link between agrarian reform and industrialisation as discussed in Rivera’s book mentioned above, it could be argued that one of the reasons for the country’s continuing failure to industrialise lies in the weaknesses in the implementation of CARP. For one, the implementation of the programme was confined to rice and corn lands[iii]. Which means that a lot of lands are still in the control of oligarchs and masses of people remain to have no access to this important capital asset. If this analytical trajectory is followed, it would point one to the conclusion that the country’s failure to industrialise stems from a situation in which the state is still very much dominated by landed oligarchs whose interests are in contradiction with the interests of those promoting industrialisation.

Which is essentially a repeat of what happened in the 1950s to the 1970s, during the time when the dominant economic strategy in the Philippines was import-substituting industrialisation (ISI). According to Rivera, the country’s failure to sustain the high productivity rates in the manufacturing sector at that time was due to the confluence of three (3) interrelated factors:

1. the persistence of an economic and social structure marked by pervasive inequitable distribution of resources ad dramatised by the land problem,
2. the internal contradictory set of interests of the local ISI manufacturers themselves leading to a weak commitment to any coherent strategy of development, and
3. the absence of a relatively autonomous, developmentalist state apparatus that could provide the essential environment for sustained industrial growth.

Land as capital asset
Land is only one of the capital assets that people use to make a living or improve their lives[iv]. In the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) of the Department for International Development (DfID), there are five (5) capital assets that humans make use of to improve their lives. These are: human, financial, physical, social and natural capital. Land or access to land is a form of natural capital.

A redistributive agrarian reform aims to improve peoples’ stock of natural capital. Whether they are able to productively make use of this capital asset, along with their other capital assets is completely another matter. How the policy environment is defined and enforced also affects people’s ability to create more value out the capital assets at their disposal.

The Philippines has a total land area of thirty (30) million hectares. Of this land area, forty-seven percent (47%) or 15 million hectares, is classified as agricultural; fifty percent (50%) or 15 million hectares as forestlands and the other three percent (3%) is specified for built-up and other uses[v] (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Land use classification in the Philippines

According to the DAR Accomplishment Report of June 2007, the coverage of CARP was 9.12 million hectares (30% of the country’s total land area). Of the 9.12 million hectares, 3.96 million hectares (43%) are actually lands that were formerly classified as forestlands. This means that of the 14 million hectares of agricultural lands, only 5.16 million hectares (37%) were included under CARP. This leaves 8.84 million hectares of agricultural lands (63%) that can still be subjected to a redistributive programme.

These 8.84 million hectares could be planted to commercial crops (sugar, banana, pineapple, mangoes, coconuts, etc.) but I was not able to get a breakdown on the specific uses of these lands. There was also no figure of how many households are employed in companies that operate in these lands.

Beyond land
Should the agricultural lands not covered by CARP be “roped in” a redistributive agrarian reform programme? So that, as some theorists argue, the mass incomes of people working in these lands could be increased and thereby stimulate industrial growth and peace as social justice would have been achieved? Or would this create the opposite effect, i.e. more poverty and social conflict?

To answer this question, one needs to look at the specific characteristics of these lands. Can these lands be made more productive in smaller parcels or are they more productive if managed in larger units[vi]? In these types of crops, what size of land units would stimulate the use of industrial farm machineries? CARP covered only thirty percent (30%) of the total households of the country, how many households would be affected by including these lands in a redistributive agrarian reform programme? Is land ownership the only option in terms of achieving a socially equitable sharing of the benefits gained from these lands?

A redistributive agrarian reform program may be likened to putting all our eggs in one basket, when there are four (4) other capital assets (human, physical, social and financial) that need to be explored. For instance, based on my own experience in staying in so many rural communities in the Philippines and in some countries in Southeast Asia, I have seen that many children of farmers and fishers go to urban centres to look for non-agriculture or non-fishery-based sources of incomes, using mainly their human assets (physical labour mainly but also their knowledge and skills in many other areas apart from those that are agriculture or fishery-related). The children who decided to stay behind had to share with their parents or even compete with them over the very minimal capital assets (land or access to a fishery) that are present in their communities.

Perhaps on top of agrarian reform (liberal or conservative or a combination), what is needed is a programme that explores ways of creating value out of people’s capital assets beyond land.


Endnotes
[i] Rivera wasn’t explicit in the type of agrarian reform that he mentioned in the book, but it appears to be the redistributive or liberal type of agrarian reform.

[ii] See Putzel (1992), p 26.

[iii] Actually, CARP also included former forestlands under the jurisdiction of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).

[iv] For a discussion of the other capital assets, please see: http://www.livelihoods.org/

[v] See House Bill 170, An Act Providing for the National Land Use Code of the Philippines and other Purposes, introduced by Heherson Alvarez in the 11th Congress of the Philippines in http://erbl.pids.gov.ph/listbills.phtml?id=37.

[vi] Some people lament that they find it ironic that the country’s rice production for instance has plummeted when the Philippines is host to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), compared to say Thailand whose agricultural experts were only trained at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. It has been pointed out that the rice production per unit area in the Philippines is still higher than that of Thailand. Although Thailand has a bigger land area (51 million hectares compared to only 30 million hectares of the Philippines) so overall they can produce more rice than the Philippines.

References
DAR (2007). Status of Agrarian Reform Implementation as of June 2007. Quezon City: Department of Agrarian Reform.

Putzel, James (1992). Captive land: politics of agrarian reform in the Philippines. London: Catholic Institute for International Relations.

Rivera, Temario (1994). Landlords and capitalists: class, family and state in Philippine manufacturing. Quezon City: Center for Integrative Development Studies/University of the Philippines

_________(Undated). Philippine Forest Figures. See: http://rainforests.mongabay.com/20philippines.htm