Soto: Choice Options

LAST July, Agrarian Reform Secretary Virgilio delos Reyes said that the Aquino administration was keen on distributing the 4,916 hectares of Hacienda Luisita under the new agrarian reform law or RA 9700. He even defined the challenge facing his agency and the DENR -- which is improving farmers’ incomes.

Three weeks after, representatives from Hacienda Luisita Incorporated (HLI), management and farmer representatives signed the controversial stock distribution option (SDO) compromise deal. Many fear that other landowners of big sugar lands subject to SDO would follow suit, nine are in Negros Occidental, 2 in Iloilo and one in Davao.

Post your reaction to the Manila hostage crisis

Is this deal as bad as others claim it to be? Where the farmers knowingly short-changed? These questions So to Speak tried to answer in a recent episode featuring stakeholders from the management side as well as from the various groups representing the farmers.

The Cojuangcos acquired Hacienda Luisita in 1957, helped in part by loans from the GSIS and the Central Bank Monetary Board with the understanding that the land was to be given to small farmers (later the wording was changed to “tenants”) within the next ten years.

By 1981, the Marcos government filed a case against the Cojuangcos, aiming to get hold of the Luisita lands and subject it to the control of the Ministry of Agrarian Reform, but the Cojuangcos argued that they could not comply with the old resolutions, as the Hacienda had no tenants, only farm workers.

This line of reasoning was even mouthed by Pnoy during his campaign sorties.

Though former President Cory Aquino promised to distribute the land to the tillers like regular farm workers and farmers, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) contained a deceitful non-land distribution clause that would turn the whole idea of redistributive justice on its head. This was the stock distribution scheme or SDO.

Under SDO, corporations that own agricultural lands can distribute shares of stocks that the corporation owns to the farmers, and such land the corporation owns is distinct from that of its shareholders and other officers. In the process, the landowners can ensure control over the whole operation while farmers become minority stakeholders. SDO was written out in the new Agrarian Reform Law (RA 9700) which was signed last year.

Hacienda Luisita was covered by SDO in 1989; a year after SDO was introduced in CARP. Figures were used to paint a rosy picture of life under this scheme.

For instance, a study made by the Center for Research and Communication (now the University of Asia and the Pacific) said that the farmer-beneficiary was assured of P33,967 a year in terms of wages and benefits while given a 0.78-hectare lot would only rake in less than twenty thousand. In fact, there was a similar study made by the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) that contradicted this finding yet it was ignored!

According to Lawyer Christian Monsod, for the past fifteen years each farmer actually got P1,600 a month out of SDO.

Farmers would eventually take to the courts in a bid to nullify the SDO. However, not without blood as what happened in 2004 and 2005. Moreover, reports of harassments and human rights violations are received by media offices to this day.

Now, this new deal wants us to believe that the farmers have decided to settle for less than their right to claim the 4,000-hectare hacienda for a 150 million financial package or 1,363 square meters per beneficiary and shares of stock in the corporation.

There is definitely more to it than that. If the DAR plans to study if the SDO was able to deliver on its promises, it need not look further than the Hacienda Luisita experience. What is happening in Luisita remains a vulgar parody of what land reform is not.

It is unfortunate that President Aquino did not step into the scene.

He could have come in, not as part of the owners of Luisita but as President of the Philippines, and started the process of correcting a decades-old inequality that has deprived more than three generations of Hacienda tillers a chance to enjoy the fruit of their toil.

Now, more than ever, is the time to make the right choices and choose the correct options.