Carvajal: True greatness

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

HIS late mother, Cory Aquino, once vowed to make agrarian reform the hallmark of her presidency. Yet, great as she was, she failed to implement it in Hacienda Luisita. This, together with many other big landed estates, resorted to stock distribution, an option that runs contrary to the spirit of genuine land reform.

President Noynoy Aquino, for his part, missed a golden opportunity for greatness by simply divesting from the family estate when he could have gone out on a limb with all that executive power at his disposal to oppose the Stock Distribution Option (SDO). Instead, the credit for this big leap forward now goes to the Supreme Court that, in nullifying the SDO, has struck what hopefully could be a death-blow to the root cause of the country’s underdevelopment.

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PNoy had a second opportunity for greatness if, more than accepting without any reservation the High Court’s decision, he had committed to put his executive power behind it. But he seems to have missed the boat again when he remarked that the owners are entitled to just compensation. This really goes without saying because the law stipulates just compensation. So, why did he have to say it if he was not looking for a backdoor for his family?

Ownership, however, does not necessarily translate into instant progress and development for the farmers who still face so many daunting challenges down the road. Without interim financing for production expenses and without essential infrastructures like irrigation and/or flood control, the farmers could end up, as has happened to so many farmer-beneficiaries, mortgaging their property and losing effective ownership of it with the onset, for instance, of a major family medical emergency.

PNoy can still redeem himself by putting his executive power fully behind the Department of Agrarian Reform’s (DAR) promise to assist the farmers in making their farms productive for the betterment of their lives. DAR’s scheme of private ownership yet collective production sounds brilliant and deserves all the help it can get from the presidency to make it work.

Unless PNoy puts all the executive power at his disposal in the service of genuine agrarian reform, he can be said to have failed to transcend his class and, hence, remains a loyal member of the oligarchy. In which case, his focused effort to make former president Gloria Arroyo accountable for lapses during her term, although right in many ways, could be nothing more than factional in-fighting that could possibly be motivated by vindictiveness.

Nobility of purpose can only be evidenced, in the present circumstance, by an uncompromising stand for the implementation of a genuine land reform program. There lies true greatness.