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Farm workers and landless peasants in the Philippines are taking a stand against a major agricultural firm in a dispute that continues to put attempts at land reform in the archipelago to a crucial test. The unrest comes as Philippine oligarchs try to cling onto illegitimate land claims in a bid to preserve the feudal exploitation of the country's rural laborers.
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The Lapanday Foods Corporation, owned by the Lorenzo clan — one of the most wealthy and brutal landlord families in the Philippines — stands accused of stealing peasant land in Northern Davao and abusing workers' rights, invoking the wrath of peoples' movements from across the Philippines. The company controls nearly 15,000 acres of land across the country.
Members of the Southern Mindanao-based Madaum Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Association, Inc., or MARBAI, held a picket Thursday at Lapanday offices in Makati City, Metro Manila, denouncing the company and describing it as “heartless.”
The company has refused to comply with orders by the Department of Agrarian Reform, DAR, to cede control of nearly 360 acres, or 145 hectares, of land in Madaum Village, Tagum City, that the government awarded to farm workers in 2015.
Lapanday even took the extraordinary step last month of resisting Philippine National Police personnel who were called in by DAR to assist the farmers in reclaiming the land. Lapanday deployed 800 armed private security guards and mercenaries who reportedly told police that they were ready to use violence to protect the company-claimed lot, in flagrant disregard of the government's land reform measures. Lapanday's inclination to deploy violent measures to defend its land claims was proven last December when its armed guards fired upon several farmers with MARBAI.
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The company has continued to defy the agrarian reform department under the leadership of progressive Secretary Rafael Mariano, who Lapanday accused of “coddling” militant peasants and allowing them to “defy laws” and “weaken the economy of the country” by supporting the redress of rural groups' grievances.
The farmer-militants with MARBAI vowed Thursday to reclaim the land from the Lorenzos, throwing bananas at photos of the wealthy landowners and swearing that they would reclaim the land. The farmers also urged President Rodrigo Duterte to grant them an audience and get behind their efforts. The Philippine head of state has signaled in the past that he supports the farm workers' struggles for justice, saying that farmers deserve to be honored because, without them, the people of the country would starve.
On May 1, International Workers' Day, Duterte told a crowd of thousands at People's Park in Davao City that oligarchs who exploit the people and don't pay taxes must be stopped.
“I will ask the Filipino people to occupy the lands in your hands,” Duterte said. “I will ask the Filipino people to get it from you and occupy your own land.”
The Lorenzos have been described by the National Network of Agrarian Reform Advocates as “a brood of landlord-comprador bourgeois who control thousands of hectares of plantations devoted to export crops.”
The oligarchs own plastics factories, luxury real estate developments and other urban properties. The family, at one point, was the second-largest stakeholder in multinational agribusiness Del Monte Pacific before selling the controlling stakes in the company. The prominent family with a diverse portfolio also at one time owned the Dencio's, Pancake House and Teriyaki Boy restaurant chains.
“The Lorenzos acquired vast landholdings and amassed wealth through land-grabbing in peasant and (Indigenous) Lumad areas and (the) exploitation of agricultural workers,” the agrarian reform group said.
Farm labor advocates claim that Lapanday, like many other agribusinesses in the region, contract peasants to grow the bananas but raise the cost of inputs such as pesticides and other agri-chemical products required to grow the fruit, while lowering prices paid for the produce.
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Mired in debt, peasants' control over the land gradually slips away as the oligarchic families' grip on the land, and the tillers, is cemented.
The Lorenzo family enjoys close relations with the Cojuangco-Aquinos, with whom it controls the Central Azucarera de Tarlac, CAT, a sugar milling site in Hacienda Luisita infamous for the exploitation of trafficked or contracted modern-day slaves.
One of the most powerful oligarch clans in the country, the Cojuangco-Aquinos, ruled the Philippines in 1986-1992 under the presidency of Maria Corazon Conjuangco-Aquino and in 2010-2016 under former President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III. In 1988, Noynoy's mother and former President Corazon Aquino put forward the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, CARP, which set the terms for the redistribution of public and private agricultural land to poor farm workers and peasants, but has since been recognized historically as a pro-landlord fraud.
Under the terms of CARP, lands legitimately entitled to Indigenous people and peasants were seized by big landlords who bizarrely qualified as “land reform beneficiaries.”
Community representatives, peasants and farm worker militants fell victim to enforced disappearances while Indigenous Lumad people were confronted by large-scale human trafficking to sites such as Hacienda Luisita's CAT, where they faced brutal exploitation and coercive labor. In many cases, dispossessed Indigenous people and land tillers were massacred during labor disputes and a paranoia by landlords that the agricultural workers nurtured pro-communist sympathies.
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Amid the land grabs entailed by the false agrarian reform, the Lorenzos also managed to seize direct control of nearly 2,500 acres of banana plantation land in Davao and place it in the hands of the Lapanday Food Corporation.
Last week, members of the communist New People's Army, NPA, launched armed attacks on numerous Lapanday facilities in Davao City while confiscating company guards' arms. NPA Southern Mindanao Regional Command spokesman Rigoberto Sanchez said the attacks, which enraged the president's daughter Mayor Sara Duterte, "served as punitive action against the Lorenzos for their numerous crimes against agricultural workers, peasants and lumad."
Progressive movements across the country, however, are urging the government to finally take responsibility for the wretched social conditions faced by the Philippine people.
“Despotic landlords and big businessmen in cahoots with transnationals and unscrupulous officials have victimized Filipinos for so long,” said Vencer Crisostomo, national chairperson of new democratic youth group Anakbayan. “It’s time (the) government actually take action against the ruling oligarchy.”
“Ultimately, this means Duterte himself breaking away from neoliberal economics that sustain the oligarchy and seriously implementing a program of genuine agrarian reform and national industrialization.”
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