ROGER Plana, 43 years old, has six kids. He feeds his family by tilling half a hectare of land in Barangay Blanco in Balingasag town, Misamis Oriental.
But Plana said the corn and rice he harvests from the plot owned by a farmers’ organization is not even enough to sustain the needs of his family.
Every harvest season, the land that Plana tills would yield an average of five sacks of rice and 10 sacks of corn, and there are times that he can’t share what he reaps to the organization.
“Kulang ra gyud kaayo ni para sa akong pamilya (This is not enough for my family),” he told Sun.Star Cagayan de Oro Monday.
To augment his income, Plana has to work as a hired hand in some big farms nearby. He earns P150 a day for working in other farms or less than P5,000 a month.
He said his family was better off when they used to own about 20 hectares of land in Balingasag, but this slowly diminished due to logging activities in the past and aggravated lately by the presence of pineapple and palm oil plantations.
Distribute lands
Plana, who is the secretary-general of the lumad group Kalumbay-Northern Mindanao and a member of the Misamis Oriental Farmers Association (Mofa), said the government should be sincere in helping the farmers by giving them lands to call their own.
Plana is just one of the dozens of farmers who staged a picket rally outside the gates of the regional office of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) in Barangay Carmen Monday.
Aside from demanding the distribution of lands under the Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill (Garb), which farmers hope will become a law someday, they also want the government to give importance to land tillers by empowering them mainly through financial assistance.
Jocelyn Agdahan, 41, a resident of Barangay Butong Quezon town in Bukidnon, said their concern is the release of their group’s Certificate of Ancestral Domain (CADT), which until now has remained in the hands of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP).
Agdahan, member of the Tribal Indigenous Oppressed Group Association (Tindoga), joined the protest action, as she empathizes with her fellow farmers in their struggle for land ownership.
Vilma Rodriguez, a mother of seven and member of the peasant group Amihan in Pangantucan town, Bukidnon, said the lands that should have been given to the poor farmers went instead to owners of huge sugarcane plantations.
“Ang mga mag-uuma unta angay manag-iya og yuta apan nahimong trabahante sa mga dagkong yutaan (The tillers should have been the owners of these lands but they ended up being workers for the landlords),” Rodriguez said.
She and her husband earn a combined income of P300 per day as sugarcane plantation workers, but this has been keeping them barely surviving.
What’s worse, she said, is that they are not allowed to work at the plantation if they will not buy rice from their employers on credit.
During payday, Rodriguez said all their wages went to paying off the debt they’ve incurred from the landlords.
“Mas labaw pa ang utang kaysa agi (Our debt is bigger than our income),” she said.
The 23-year-old Jessiemer Loi Algarme, a Sociology student at Central Mindanao University and spokesman of the League of Filipino Students in Bukidnon, said he and the other students joined the picket rally to support the farmers.