WHY IS THE WORLD BANK ATTACKING LAND REFORM IN THE PHILIPPINES?

WHY IS THE WORLD BANK ATTACKING LAND REFORM IN THE PHILIPPINES?
By David Bacon
Dollars and Sense, 3/15/25
https://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2025/0325bacon.html

A banana farmer pulls bunches of harvested bananas to the packing shed on the cable way.  This keeps the bunches from being harmed.


When the Peoples' Power movement brought down Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, land reform was one of its most important demands.  But even after Corazon Aquino had been elected President in the midst of great hopes for change, land reform was still only won at the cost of bloody struggle.  Frustrated at waiting for Aquino to act, ten thousand farmers marched on the Malacañang Palace, and twelve were shot down on the Mendiola Bridge.  

In the tense months that followed, a new constitution was adopted.  Article 13 stated that the purpose of land reform was the "just distribution" of agricultural lands "founded on the right of farmers and regular farmworkers, who are landless, to own directly or collectively the lands they till..." Aquino proclaimed Executive Order 229, a first step,, and Congress then passed the Republic Act No. 6657, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

In the years that followed, workers on the big plantations of bananas, pineapples, oil palms, sugar cane and rubber trees sought to become owners of the land where they'd been wage workers.  They transformed into cooperatives the militant unions they'd organized to wrest a decent living from foreign corporations or wealthy landowning families.  Workers were transformed into collective farmers on the plantations where they'd labored for generations.

Today, however, land reform is in danger, from a proposal called SPLIT - Support to Parcelization of Land for Individual Titling.  Parcelization means that commonly-held and collectively farmed lands are divided into individual tiny plots, which can then be sold.  It would make the operation of a large farm impossible.  "Selling of parcelized agrarian lands has been overtly or covertly taking place in many plantations," reports Koronado Apuzen, who helped organize banana coops in Mindanao in the early 1990s, and then established the Foundation for Agrarian Reform Cooperatives in Mindanao (FARMCOOP).  "Agrarian lands have been become the commodity of the realty market."

Support for SPLIT comes from the World Bank, which finances it.  Its proposed budget is $473 million, 78% of which comes from the Bank and 22% from the Philippine government.  The World Bank portion, $370 million, is a loan payable in 29-39.5 years.  This adds to the country's foreign debt of $139.64 billion.  The Philippines is the fifth largest borrower from the Bank, and in 2023 owed it $2.33 billion.  

Given that SPLIT represents a relatively small portion of the money lent by the Bank to the Philippines, its motivation seems more ideological than financial.  The Bank has a long history of pushing market-based proposals for land ownership and development.  Its statement on land policy says "Making land rights transferable allows the landless to access land through sales and rental markets or through public transfers, and further increases investment incentives."  It has provided financing, training and technical help to this end since the late 1960s.  Requests to the Bank for comment and interviews for this article were not answered.

 

Denmark Aguitas catches the bunnch of bananas on his shoulder as it's cut from the tree, and carries it to the cable way, on the DARBCO co-operative farm.

Yussi Titio washes bananas in the DARBCO co-op packing shed.


The Philippine government seems equally committed to this market orientation.  "The President wants it done immediately," according to a recent press statement.  Current president Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, son of overthrown dictator Ferdinand Marcos, attended SPLIT land privatization ceremonies in four provinces, and according to DAR Undersecretary and SPLIT Project Implementation Officer Jesry T. Palmares, "he wants to feel and know that the agrarian reform that his father started succeed and be in place."   Last May the World Bank extended the implementation period to 2027.

The Philippines is a poor country - the source of migrant workers who travel the world to work because they can't make a living at home.  The cooperatives created an alternative to this forced displacement and migration.  One hundred and eight million Filipinos today inhabit a country of 115,000 square miles in over 7000 islands.  In 1991 there were over 11 million landless farming families, about 40% of the total agricultural population and a number that had more than doubled in 20 years.  Landless families today still number in the millions, while 52% of the country's farmland still belongs to 11% of all land owners, but CARP did make a dent in the concentration of agrarian land ownership..

The law was a complex compromise, and set up a process in which workers could petition to become owners of plantations that had belonged to corporations like Dole and Del Monte.  The government set aside a fund for compensating owners, and according to one study, after 12 years the Department of Agrarian Reform had redistributed 53.4 percent of the Philippines' total farmland, to 3.1 million rural poor households.

SPLIT is likely to allow corporations and elite families who lost land in the Philippine land reform to regain title if poor farmers begin selling small parcels carved from former cooperative lands.  Those companies never gave up their lands easily.  On Dole's former Mindanao banana plantations, banana farmer coops had to fight to make the promise of reform real.  Even after gaining title to the land, control still remained in the hands of the Dole Corporation subsidiary, Stanfilco.  Using its control of the plantation infrastructure, shipping and marketing, it imposed "onerous" contracts with prices so low that the workers-turned-farmers were even poorer than before.

In response, from December 1997 to February 1998 over 2000 members of four coops refused to pick bananas.  Jean Lacamento, now a board member of the Diamond Farms Agrarian Reform Beneficiary Multipurpose Cooperative (DARBMUPCO), remembers that "for three months we lived under the banana trees.  We knew we'd never get out of debt if we didn't win.  We couldn't feed our families or send our kids to the hospital when they were sick."

With support from international food unions and other activists, the coops won, first changing the terms of the "onerous" contracts.  Then they found another buyer willing to take their bananas to Asian markets in Japan, South Korea and elsewhere, the Italian firm Unifrutti, which paid a much higher price.

 

Eleuteria Chacon, chairwoman of the Checkered Farms co-op.

Koronado Apuzen, executive director of FARMCOOP, and former leader of the union for farm workers in Mindanao


The income of the cooperatives' families rose 126% in the first two years after the strike.  Eleuteria Chacon, head of the Checkered Farms Agrarian Reform Beneficiary Multipurpose Cooperative (CFARBEMPCO), says they were able to pay the amortization on their land and the old debts to Stanfilco in 18 years instead of their original 30 year term.  The movement to abrogate "onerous" contracts spread.  Six other coops of 400 small farmers also went on strike against Stanfilco and won.  The coops then set up a marketing arm, the Federation of ARB Banana-based Cooperatives of Davao (FEDCO) and by 2002 it had 16 member coops with 3,588 farmers owning 4,670 hectares of bananas.

Coops experimented with different forms of organization.  Some paid wages and a dividend based on the coop's income.  Others divided the planted areas equally, giving each farmer an income that depended on their productivity.  On the DARBMUPCO plantation, income for its 715 coop members rose from 3500 pesos/month after the strike to 20,000 pesos/month in 2004 (about 57 pesos to the U.S. dollar).  Apuzen and his coworkers organized FARMCOOP to provide technical assistance and marketing help.

"Our struggle began with the Peoples Power strike," remembers Esteban Cequiña at DARBMUPCO.  "We had no hospital or medicine and when our children got sick we had to go to the owners to beg for money.  I remember that I cried in front of the accountant."  
Adds Demetrio Patiño.  "We had to struggle to make ends meet before.  Now I own my own house, I have savings, and I have a car.  I used to get around on a bicycle.  We are still ordinary workers, but now we manage a multi-million dollar business."  

Sustaining a cooperative organization is not easy. Banana farmers send their kids to college, but having educated children creates problems when they're no longer interested in farming.  "I hope that 20 years from now our children will be running the coop," says manager Carmela Pedregosa.  In the meantime, if a member wants to leave, the coop will buy the land to make sure it stays in the coop.  As they get older, coop members rely more on hiring people, many of whom are family members, to do the work in the banana groves.  "Perhaps they will eventually become coop members themselves," Pedregosa says.

The banana coops in particular face another existential problem.  The spread of two fungus infestations, fusarium wilt and black sigatoka, is already affecting thousands of hectares. Banana cultivation as the coops practice it may no longer be sustainable.  Monocrop banana cultivation has a high environmental cost since it exhausts the soil quickly, requiring the application of chemical fungicides to control disease, and chemical fertilizer to keep the soil productive. According to Teodoro Tadtad, former manager of DARBMUPCO, "Now that lands are depleted, the challenge for us coop leaders is the improvement of our lands, the capability of the soil to produce."

Just a few years after getting rid of the "onerous" contracts, FARMCOOP began urging its member coops to begin exploring organic farming because of the rising issue of sustainability.  
According to Kahlil Apuzen-Ito, FARMCOOP's technical advisor, "We are responding to the challenging realities of rural underdevelopment in the backdrop of rapid environmental degradation."  FARMCOOP advocates "a land use and community building movement that strives to harmoniously integrate human dwellings, microclimate, annual and perennial plants, animals, soils and water into stable productive communities."

 

During the 1998 banana strike at Diamond Farms against Dole Corporation, the banana farmers were expelled from their homes and lived under tarps at the edge of the plantation


Facing these problems, however, agricultural coops have received very little help from the Philippine government.  In October, 2022, thirteen coops signed petitions to DAR Secretary Conrado Estrella, asking him to issue an order to protect the agrarian reform program, and in particular the plantation-base cooperatives.  "The right of ownership is not absolute," they stated. The purpose of the land reform mandated by the Constitution is "to promote social justice and to move our country to sound rural development and industrialization based on its fundamental principle that the land has a social function and land ownership has a social responsibility."

The Department of Agrarian Reform ignored the petitions and other protests.  In December, 2024, several coops and advocate organizations met with the World Bank SPLIT Project Team in Taguig City to urge it to drop its support for SPLIT.  They argued that the coops have been starved of government support, and that scarce resources should strengthen them rather than pulling them apart.  

Danny Carranza, Executive Director of KATARUNGAN - the Movement for Agrarian Reform and Social Justice, told the meeting that lack of support "is the main reason why a lot of farmers are discouraged to continue farming. They become bankrupt after devastation from typhoons or drought. And they do not receive support for them to recover and develop."

One coop, the BANASI Farmers Association, received its collective certificate of land ownership in 1997, but is still waiting for formal land titles, which prevents it from accessing financing and other services.  Randy Cirio, a young BANASI farmer and president of the National Confederation of Family Farmers Organizations (PAKISAMA), led a march in 2008 to the Malacañang Palace to reinforce their land reform claim, eventually leading the Supreme Court to award 123 hectares to the coop's members.  

"It took so long," Cirio told Bank representatives. "We marched 444 kilometers to Malacañang, just to fight for our right to land ... Now many developers are showing up to buy it. We fear we will lose all the hardships and sacrifices we made."

PAKISAMA national coordinator Raul Socrates Banzuela said SPLIT undermined the commitment of coop farmers to the land.  "The mentality is that we were not getting any support services, why should we keep [it]?  So we asked, does SPLIT have any components whatsoever that would ensure support services, [to help] farmers increase their productivity and their income?  But there were none."  Coops, he noted, only involved a quarter of the farmers who have claimed land, and they should be encouraged to organize.  "SPLIT, however, instead of supporting the coops, would lead to their dissolving," he warned.  "SPLIT is the nail that will be put into the coffin of the agrarian reform."

 

A worker harvests sugarcane on a plantation in Negros

A sugar worker on the steps of his home in Negros

Workers homes line the street in the company town of a sugar mill in Negros.

 

Officials from the Department of Agrarian Reform are intent on implementing the SPLIT program, rather than supporting cooperatives.  In some cases they have recruited people to claim land that has already been included in long-standing cooperatives.  This took place on the Checkered Farms coop, where according to Eleuteria Chacon, the department is pitting farmers against one another by bringing in new agrarian reform claimants.  "But we've owned the land for almost 20 years," she charged.

Alter Trade Foundation, Inc (ATFI), provides support for small cooperatives of sugar cane producers on Negros, an island in the Visayas.  Earl Parreno, its chairperson, described the 2003 organization of MIARBA, an organic grower.  While ATFI gave them help with training and access to capital, the government offered no assistance.  Instead, DAR suddenly announced it had to parcelize its land, and brought in land surveyors.  "These surveyors are actually surveyors for real estate companies, not for agriculture," he said.  "The technical staff of DAR do not have any knowledge of farming.  What does the World Bank hope to accomplish?"

A report by the Center for Economic and Social Rights and several other organizations, Resisting Agrarian Injustice, notes that the lands of some Negros sugar coops "were acquired through land occupation actions by the then-claimant farmworkers."  Negros has had a heavy presence of the Philippine military for several decades, and land struggles have been caught up in its counter-insurgency activity.  As a result, the report states, "All organizations reported military presence in all steps of the SPLIT process - even at the initial 'consultation meeting' held by DAR with affected ARBs [coop members who are agrarian reform beneficiaries], before any resistance to SPLIT had been expressed."

The report's investigators interviewed farmers on several cooperatives.  "All organizations interviewed reported that soldiers - sometimes accompanied by DAR and village officials, sometimes by themselves - had engaged in house-to-house visits to 'persuade' ARBs to abide by the SPLIT project."  

During the December meeting with World Bank representatives, one Bank staff person alleged that despite the coop protests, participation in SPLIT is voluntary.  One bank document states that "ARBs wishing to continue to farm their land in a communal manner can opt out of the parcelization process."  However, if any group of coop members want parcelization, the process will move forward even if others oppose it, and DAR will simply issue an order to enforce it.  In this environment in Negros, former plantation owners, including members of the Elezalde, Starke and Zayco families, have reasserted claims to land awarded to land reform beneficiaries.

 

 

Jane Algoso was 11 years old, in the sixth grade at the time of the strikes against Dole.  She cut the dead leaves from banana trees, working for two hours before school, four hours afterwards, and a full day on Saturday.  Child labor ended on the plantations that became co-ops.


In February four organizations representing 14,000 small farmers, agrarian reform beneficiaries, indigenous and marginalized rural people sent a letter to the World Bank charging that "those who stand to gain long-term from the SPLIT Project are land developers as well as corporate agri-and non-agribusiness conglomerates ... In addition, the context in which SPLIT is being implemented is one in which farmers have faced security risks." The letter requests the World Bank "to immediately freeze the SPLIT project funding while serious allegations are investigated ...The remaining project funds must not be disbursed without addressing these urgent issues that are upending thousands of livelihoods."

At the December meeting, FARMCOOP's Koronado Apuzen outlined the three basic changes in SPLIT advocated by its opponents.  "Agrarian reform must continue as a social program of the government. Lands [which have already been subject to parcelization] should be sold only to the cooperative, so that it will remain agrarian land."  Funds to pay for the land of coop members who want to sell out should come from the Land Bank of the Philippines, which should also provide money to the coops for research on disease control, farm inputs and credit for farm rehabilitation.  And instead of concentrating on land privatization, the DAR should give adequate support to the cooperatives, in collaboration with NGOs that are already providing it.

"SPLIT is not the answer to the problem of agrarian reform in the Philippines," Apuzen emphasized.  "It will kill agrarian reform."

 

Danilo Carillon was 16 years old, and stopped going to school five years before the picture was taken.  He earned 86 pesos per day (about $2) for bagging 160 bunches.  His plantation did not become a co-op during land reform.

 

Girley PIlones, 11 years old, flattened out plastic sheets used in growing bananas.  The sheets were coated with Lorsban, a pesticide used to kill insects on the banana trees.  Her plantation did not become a co-op during land reform.