ON THE first day of the 16th Congress today, the militant peasant group Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) backed the filing of a resolution opposing Charter change (Cha-cha) and the proposed new land reform law that seeks the nationalization and free distribution of lands to landless tillers.
KMP secretary general Antonio Flores said that “instead of denationalizing the economy through Cha-cha’s granting of 100 percent foreign ownership of lands, the 16th Congress should heed the Filipino peasantry’s demand for the nationalization and free distribution of agricultural lands.”
“It is totally ironic that while we offer foreigners 100 percent ownership of lands, our farmers remain landless and exploited,” Flores said.
“Cha-cha and the sell-out of our lands to foreigners is not the solution to the increasing landlessness. It will only worsen the growing poverty and hunger suffered by our people,” says Flores, who joined Anakpawis party-list Representative Fernando Hicap in filing House Resolution 13 opposing Cha-cha and House Bill 252 or the Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill.
HR 13 states that “Charter change that seeks to give foreigners full ownership of lands and the denationalization of the economy will worsen and deepen semi-feudalism in the Philippines.”
“It will strengthen the control and domination of foreign big businesses, bourgeois compradors, and big landlords over the semi-feudal, agrarian, and backward economy to the detriment of genuine agrarian reform and national industrialization,” the resolution said.
“At present, millions of hectares of lands, coastal communities, and offshore areas are being targeted by large-scale and destructive mining projects led by foreign mining corporations directly undermining the rural people’s rights to the lands, their civil, political and human rights, and, the wanton destruction of the environment,” HR 13 added.
The Anakpawis resolution also called President Aquino as the “Number 1 Salesman of our lands and national patrimony that have been offered to agro-corporations exchange of so-called foreign investment.”
HR 13 also warned that “the removal of the constitutional prohibition on the presence and basing of foreign military forces and nuclear weapons in the country serves US interest and will result to increased US military intervention in the Philippines that is in accordance with the US military’s strategic pivot to the Asia-Pacific that would drag the Philippines to the US’ military intervention and aggression.”
At the same time, the Anakpawis lawmaker filed House Bill 252 or the Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill (GARB), which “declares the nationalization of all agricultural lands in the country.”
The GARB also assailed President Aquino, “a scion of big landlords, the Cojuangco-Aquino clan of Tarlac province and owner of Hacienda Luisita,” for prolonging the peasantry’s agony by “arbitrarily extending the CARPER until his term ends in 2016.
“The President is also playing with the option to “end CARP” and maintain only the support services component of agrarian reform. This is also in line with the administration’s thrust to continuously denationalize the economy by opening up lands for foreign investments,” it said.
The GARB provides that the State “recognizes that only nationalization of all lands can break up the monopoly of a few landowners and foreign control of our lands. It is through nationalization and the subsequent free distribution of lands to landless tillers that a genuine agrarian reform can be implemented in the country and finally end the feudal and semi-feudal exploitation of our farmers; render them social and historical justice, unleash their productive powers and set our agriculture on the right path of development.”
“We are once again submitting this bill in the 16th Congress to further push the demand for genuine agrarian reform, now, through the nationalization of all agricultural lands and its subsequent free distribution to landless tillers for the realization of the Filipino peasantry’s emancipation from the centuries-old feudal bondage from the soil,” the GARB said.
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