2Unable to remain competitive, many indebted peasant families have been forced to sell their land, permanently abandon farming and migrate towards major cities. The Philippines has hence become one of the most urbanized countries in the region. Manila now has a population of over 2 million, of which a very high number live in conditions of extreme precariousness in the heart of sinister slums. Industry and services have not developed enough to absorb the massive rural exodus and as a result, many young households have left in search of work abroad, in the Middle Eastern oil countries or in capitals of the “newly industrialized countries” of Southeast Asia (Singapore, Kuala Lumpur). At present, there are over two million Filipino emigrants. However the latter live in especially harsh conditions, risking expulsion as soon as economic and financial crises arise like the one suffered by Malaysia and Thailand between 1997 and 1999.

Rice Farming Tradition and Sugar Plantation Expansion

5Like in Mexico and South America, it was not long before the Spanish set up a system of encomiendas in the Philippines, through which the colonial authorities required the farmers to pay an annual tribute tax in cash or kind, with the complicity of the local chiefs (datus). As early as the 17th century, they allowed the chiefs to take ownership of land planted with rice fields and then have them farmed by sharecroppers. Sharecropping or casamajan contracts specified that landowners had to advance the seeds required for the production as well as the rice needed by the peasant families for their own subsistence; in exchange for which the harvest had to be divided equally among the landowners and the sharecroppers, once the seed loans and their interest had been deducted from the harvests.

7Areas farmed in sugar cane were extended by progressively clearing forest areas, up until then jointly owned, located on ancient alluvial terraces with deep, well-drained soil, whereas the lower zones, with waterlogged soil, continued being reserved for rice growing alone. The new clearing, done directly by the farmers, but under the control of the traditional local notables, made it possible to steadily enlarge the notables’ land estates. Extension of areas devoted to sugar cane was all the easier since the work calendars for the two crops are complementary. Rice requires a lot of work for manual transplanting, in the rainy season, at a time when sugar cane only requires weeding. Sugar cane requires manual labor especially during the dry season, for harvesting with machetes. The farming community should therefore have benefited from additional cash income without having to endanger its food production. Yet, often indebted to merchants and obliged to share half of their harvests with the landed bourgeoisie, farmers were far from being the first beneficiaries of the soar in sugar production.

8In fact, merchants and landowners were the ones who benefited the most from the development of the agro-export economy and, for that reason, were able to invest in their children’s education. Once those two social categories began mixing, an intellectual elite of ilustrados progressively emerged, which became the mouthpiece for Philippine nationalism. That intelligentsia allied with the North American troops to evict the Spanish authorities but did not manage to gain independence immediately. As is common knowledge, the Philippines became a colony of the United States, from 1898 to 1946. United States investors rapidly set up major sugar refineries with steamrollers and centrifugal machines, including two in Pampanga province. Those new firms quickly benefited from export quotas for refined sugar, at guaranteed prices, from the North American government. In turn, they were able to grant sugar cane delivery quotas to the various landowners located in the vicinity of their refineries. The contracts stipulated that the refineries had the right to keep 40% of the sugar extracted, with the remaining 60% divided into equal shares between the owners and their sharecroppers.

9At the time of the country’s rise to independence, in 1946, there were already substantial inequalities in the distribution of land ownership in the Philippines. The concentration of farmland in the hands of a minority of landowners and companies essentially resulted from two different processes:

• The setting up of major, most often monastic, colonial plantations, in regions from which the initial occupants were very soon brutally expulsed;

• The progressive accumulation of farmable plots in the hands of notables and usurious merchants who, having made cash loans to small farmers, were then able to seize their land when it became impossible for the farmers to reimburse the loans.

10The first process was a “Latin-American” type process: a colonial oligarchy brutally took over vast surfaces by expulsing the native farm community from the land that it had previously occupied. As such the first major sugar estates were set up in the Visayan islands and the south of Luzon island, at the time of the Spanish colonization. The major sugar cane operations kept on expanding throughout the period of North American presence, following the modernization and enlargement of sugar refineries. For the most part, they were farmed by owners; but many of them were split up into small plots of a few hectares, and handed over to sharecroppers. The sugar cane planters were almost all forced to periodically recruit seasonal wage-earning laborers from the neighboring islands. As for the island of Mindanao, it was “colonized” later, with the setting up of major North American companies which were given huge surface areas of fairly uncleared land, considered up until then as public property. It was not long before the import and settlement of laborers from other islands caused serious conflicts with the native populations (Ledesma 1992).

12Once independence was obtained, many Philippine farmers often only had plots of land under five hectares per family. However the land concentration movement then only worsened, under the influence of the same mechanisms, in the initial years following independence. Already heavily populated and almost totally cleared, the central Luzon plain was very harshly affected by the major world economic crisis in the 1930s. Many farmers, unable to keep possession of their harnessed equipment and draft buffaloes, ended up forced to work as simple farm laborers, during peak work periods only (McLennan 1998). At first, the merchants and usurers who had progressively managed to take over the land previously held by the farming community did not personally make use of the farm areas that had entered into their possession. They almost always handed it over to landless farmers (for tenant farming or sharecropping); and the latter had to work the plots under the dependence of the absentee landowners. At the end of the 1960s, slightly over half of the farmland was cultivated in that way, in unstable conditions, by nearly three million peasant families (Cunnington 1989).

Fig. 1: Economic Results for the Main Cropping or Animal Raising Systems (1999)

Animal raising or cropping systems	Gross added value per hectare	Maximum surface area per worker
Two annual rice cycles	58,000 pesos	3 hectares
Three annual rice cycles	80,000 pesos	3 hectares
Tomatoes and bitter squash	113,000 + 175,000 pesos	0.30 hectare
Tomatoes and sweet squash	113,000 + 230,000 pesos	0.30 hectare
Arabian Jasmine	2,000,000 pesos	0.05 hectare
Camias	1,000,000 pesos	0.20 hectare
Fish ponds	440,000 pesos	1 hectare

Source: De Lataillade et al. (2002)

Social Tension, Agrarian Reform and the “Green Revolution”

13The social injustice and poverty that resulted from that situation in the rural zones of the central Luzon plain very soon led farmers to rise up against the land oligarchy. Pampanga province experienced an initial farmer uprising, even before independence, in 1931, at the time of the great international economic crisis. However the most famous rebellion was certainly the one that occurred between 1946 and 1950; led by communist party leaders, the Hukbahalap movement, which had already opposed the Japanese occupation and which then directly went after the absentee landlords criticized by farmers for handing over their land for very short periods only and in exchange of rents that were far too high (Fegan 1998). Concerned with “containing” the expansion of communism in Southeast Asia, the Americans then suggested carrying out an anti-insurrectionary agrarian reform; in addition, a few initial measures designed to make land tenure modes more secure succeeded, to a certain extent, to calm the rebellion as from the end of the 1940s.

14Along the same lines, the Embassy of the United States of America published the “Hardie report” in 1952 which recommended eliminating sharecropping in the Philippines, replacing it by forms of tenant farming with set rents, and redistributing land, over a threshold of 4 hectares, planted in rice and held by private individuals. An initial agrarian reform law was indeed passed in 1955, under the presidency of Ramón Magsaysay; however, due to the resistance from landowners, the latter set the ownership ceiling at 75 hectares and excluded land designated for animal raising, sugar cane, coconut trees, fruit trees and many other perennial crops from its scope of application. As a result, the total surface area concerned by that reform did not end up surpassing 20,000 hectares in 6 years, in a few pilot zones of the central plain (Haymani et al. 1990).

15Elected president of the Republic in 1965, with the support of the land oligarchy, Ferdinand Marcos was himself not a big partisan of agrarian reform. However, as farmer discontent regarding landowners was growing nonstop, Congress had to take the initiative to pass a new land law, in 1971, so as to decrease the maximum ceiling of ownership to only 7 hectares and systematically replace sharecropping and contracts with a share in the produce by the payment of a set rent. All the landowners ended up obliged to sell their surplus areas and moreover had to work the remaining 7 hectares directly themselves or rent them in exchange of payment of a set rent, not indexed on the yields obtained. Farmers could no longer be expulsed from one year to the next and their land tenures could even become inheritable. Nevertheless, only the land sown in rice or corn was concerned by the law, with the exclusion of cash crops. Land planted in sugar cane could therefore avoid expropriation and continue being farmed by sharecroppers. In 1972, in face of the brutal interventions by the New People’s Army, the armed branch of the Communist Party, President Marcos was very soon forced to instigate martial law; however he also had to make the decision to speed up agrarian reform in the central Luzon plain, where farm community unrest was the most blatant. Undertaken for reasons of domestic security, the reform was only applied slowly, due to the bureaucratic red tape and fraudulent maneuvers committed by landowners. From 1972 to 1986, nevertheless, a fourth of the land concerned by the 1971 land law was redistributed, essentially in the central Luzon plain and specifically in Pampanga province.

17Irrigation also contributed to substantially stabilizing rice yields by decreasing the frequency of very poor harvests. It is easily understandable that, in those conditions, it had become worthwhile for farmers to replace the payment of the former land imposition proportional to the harvest by the payment of a set rent. Sharecropping had previously offered the advantage of dividing up the risks inherent to possible droughts or floods between farmers and their landowners, as the land allowance was indeed very low when catastrophic harvests occurred. However the payment of a set rent turned out, on the other hand, much more favorable for intensifying crop systems, once those risks were eliminated by irrigation and drainage, since once the rent was paid, all the yield increases generated by the intensification could come back to the producers (Riedinger 1995).

20The “green revolution” made especially rapid achievements regarding yield increases per hectare. Those yields were actually more than doubled in less than 15 years and surpassed 4 tons of paddy per crop cycle in the Pampanga estuary and the other alluvial plains on Luzon island. To such an extent that the Philippines obtained rice self-sufficiency as early as 1977. The paradox is that those transformations occurred, for the most part, under Ferdinand Marcos’ presidency, a leader known for his authoritarian ways of governing the country after martial law was proclaimed in 1972. However, it must be acknowledged that it was indeed his agrarian reform and support programs for small farmers that made it possible to intensify rice growing systems in the Pampanga estuary. Carried out for essentially political reasons, the agrarian reform implemented under the dictator’s regime did indeed enable progressive multiplication of family trade farms managed by small holders, with very beneficial effects on agricultural development in the Luzon alluvial plains. However, not all peasant families benefited from the “green revolution” in the same way. Some of them who were unable to reimburse their loans had to abandon farming, look for wage-earning work and join the hordes of unemployed in the huge slums of Manila.

Growing Diversification of Farming Systems

21As from the end of the 1970s, farmers from the province of Pampanga had to face new economic and environmental conditions. First of all, the rise in the price of energy and nitrate fertilizers that followed the 1974 “oil crisis” contributed to increasing the costs related to running crop systems using motorization and chemicalization. Subjected to the imperatives of structural adjustment programs, Corazon Aquino’s government then had to stop subsidizing chemical fertilizers towards the end of the 1980s and as for her successor, he was forced to put an end to cereal import quotas, without being able to replace the latter by tariff protections. Quite obviously, the resulting price ratios were much less favorable for intensive rice farming. In 1981, the construction of a highway linking Manila to the west coast of the island, perpendicular to the central plain’s hydrographic network, had negative repercussions on the circulation of surface water in the Pampanga estuary. The eruption of the Pinatubo volcano, in 1991, and the untimely mud flows that resulted from it over the following years, worsened the situation even more, with the effect subjecting some valley bottoms to over six-month-long floods. However, faced with those adverse conditions, the well-off farming community found the means to diversify its cropping and animal rearing systems so as to take into account the new price ratios that had come into effect.

24Another alternative was to reduce the stretches of land set aside for rice farming and devote the areas freed up to products with higher added value. It had become all the easier for farmers to reduce their areas sown in rice, without endangering their food supplies, since the rice yields per hectare had already more than doubled, further to the use of “green revolution” varieties. Small plots were therefore permanently converted in order to accommodate exclusively market garden rotations from then on, annually alternating a cycle of tomatoes and a season of squash. Requiring substantial work, the harvest of both those vegetables stretches over a two- to three-month period and limits the areas that can be used for that rotation to only 0.3 hectare per worker.

27In addition to traditional farmyard animal raising, most farmers have each also set up one or two small landless animal units, with the purchase of feed from outside sources. Raising pigs for fattening, more or less directly associated with the raising of sows for breeding piglets is the main activity. Raising female laying ducks has also recently begun expanding; bought at the age of six months, ready to lay, the ducks are raised in groups of approximately 200 head, for three years, and fed on paddy seeds left on the ground at the time of harvesting and threshing in the rice fields. A few farmers also raise a small number of cows and grass-fed calves, on posts, along paths, in rice fields covered with stubble after the harvest, and on the sparse jointly-owned pastureland. The number of bovines is nonetheless limited due to the very low surface area in grassland. Raising female buffaloes for production of milk and buffalo calves also quite often encounters a shortage of pastureland, due to the fact that most of the former marshland has long since been dried up and transformed into rice fields.

28In the three districts of Guagua, Lubao and Santa Rita, most peasant families have managed to substantially diversify their farm activities over the past two decades; and many of them now simultaneously associate several cropping and animal raising systems on their farms. Among the most frequently encountered systems, the most noteworthy are: a single crop of rice in three annual crop cycles, a double rice season in alternation with a counter-season crop cycle, rotation of a single season of rice with a long-term market garden crop, exclusively market garden rotations, tree and shrub plantations, fish farming in ponds, small landless animal units, etc. However, as farmers have not all been able to access the same resources in land, water, labor and equipment, and for lack of all being able to work in similar social and economic conditions, they do not currently implement the same combinations of these various cropping and animal raising systems.

Social Differences within the Farming Community

29In the three districts studied, approximately four-fifths of the farms are family production units, on which there is practically no use of wage-earning labor. Those farms currently accommodate farming systems that are quite different from one another.

31Peasants whose income cleared on the farms allows them to both meet their family’s basic needs and regularly renew the operating capital manage about 65% of all production units. A wide range of farming systems are used on those farms:

• Although their farms (approximately 15% of the total) each cover less than one hectare, some peasant families have succeeded in obtaining the resources needed, whether through inheritance or outside income, for acquiring diesel pumps and implementing very intensive and very lucrative farming systems per surface unit:

• A few have created a pond covering their whole area and are exclusively concentrated on fish farming; they make an income ranging from 50,000 to 400,000 pesos per worker.

• Others have totally specialized their operations in flower shrub plantations (jasmine and camias); their incomes range from 50,000 to 100,000 pesos per worker.

• Still others continue rice farming, with two annual crop cycles, and associate landless pig raising, breeding-fattening, from 3 to 5 sows per farm; in that case, the rice is almost totally earmarked for family consumption while the pig production provides cash income; those families each manage to earn between 50,000 and 100,000 pesos, in all, involving a single worker only.

• 40% of the farms cover between one and three hectares and have farming systems combining several cropping and animal raising systems. The families concerned generally each have a hand-driven motor tiller and a power-driven pump; they almost all associate two annual rice cycles with a third activity, requiring much more intensive work: counter-season peanuts or corn, market garden crops, fruit or floral trees, pig breeding-fattening, or fish farming ponds.

• • 17 In 1999, the nominal exchange rate was approximately 41 pesos for one US dollar.

  For very many of them (30% of all farms), the size of the third unit, limited by the quantity of available capital, is still much too small (one to five sows, 1000 to 5000 sq. meters of fish pond, 10 to 40 mango trees, etc.) to require more than one person working full time per farm. The incomes range from 100,000 to 400,000 pesos17 per worker.

• For the others (10% of all farms), the intensiveness of the crop system practiced (market gardens, floral trees) and the area devoted to it make it possible to provide full time employment for at least two family members. Income ranges between 150,000 and 300,000 pesos per family worker.

• Some peasant families (10% of all farms) have more than three hectares each and manage to offer permanent employment to two of their workers without having to invest in the most work-intensive cropping systems. In addition to two rice crops a year, they associate a relatively large-size fish farming pond or a pig breeding unit. The income ranges from 150,000 to 600,000 pesos per family worker.

32Fifteen percent of the farms cover more than three hectares each and can be qualified as “entrepreneurial” farms, insofar as those in charge, who initially had the means to invest in work-intensive crop systems (horticulture), associated with the annual double rice crop, now have to make use of salaried workers, in addition to their own family workforce.

33Five percent of the farms can be qualified as “capitalist” farms insofar as they are owned by owners who do not directly work on the farms themselves and therefore exclusively make use of a wage-earning workforce (laborers and foremen). Most of them are farms specialized in a single crop or animal raising system: pig breeding from 50 to 100 sows, broiler production units with 10,000 to 20,000 head, fruit plantations with 100 to 200 trees.

34In comparison to many other regions in the Philippines, the situation of the farmers does not seem really dramatic in the Pampanga estuary. Despite the small size of their farms, most peasant families have been able to invest in the intensification and diversification of their farming systems, and now earn incomes that, while still modest, nonetheless allow them to provide for the family’s basic needs. Without a doubt, that is due to the proximity of the capital and the emergence therein of a middle class whose purchases in farm produce have diversified substantially. The situation also results from the rural credit programs implemented by the government and investments made by the public authorities in water management, in a region where the alluvial soil is very fertile. However, the important factor doubtlessly lies in the fact that the farmers were the ones who took advantage of conditions that were particularly favorable for farm diversification and intensification.

35By favoring the development of family farms whose land tenures were relatively secured, the agrarian reform undertaken in the 1970s undeniably had positive effects on the capacity of peasant families to integrate market trade and invest in the intensification and diversification of their crop and animal raising systems. The demonstration has therefore been made that, far from being a form of archaic, outdated production sentenced to the status quo, family trade farming can be evolutionary and highly efficient in economic terms.

The Acuteness of the “Agrarian Issue” in the Philippines

36Despite the advent of a more democratic regime in 1986, the idea according to which it would be worthwhile to give preference to promoting forms of peasant farming in the name of economic effectiveness and no longer only for reasons of social justice has yet to win acceptance in the Philippines. Although land redistribution has picked up relative speed since 1988, we are indeed forced to acknowledge that the agrarian reform still only marches forward to the beat of land conflicts: peasant occupations, police crackdowns, legal battles in court, etc.

37It is estimated that upon Corazon Aquino’s arrival to the presidency, less than 315,000 hectares had been redistributed to approximately 7% of the peasant families (Riedinger 1995). However, it was possible to observe how that agrarian reform and the protection of the domestic market regarding cereal imports had already managed to create conditions favorable to the implementation of very work- and input-intensive rice farming systems in the alluvial plains of Luzon island, with positive effects on the increase of productivity, the level of payment and the capacity of investment by peasants who benefited from it. The security the peasants benefited from on their land tenures, the lower impositions the farming community was subjected to and the possibility for the latter to have access to irrigation and farm loans very clearly enabled the rise in food and market produce on family farms (Pingali et al. 1995). However, by limiting redistribution only to land normally planted with rice or corn, and farmed by tenant farmers, and excluding large capitalist tree plantations, the agrarian reform law enacted by Ferdinand Marcos also sometimes prompted owners to evict their sharecroppers, in order to manage their land directly, going as far as setting up non-food producing crop systems, requiring little workforce and therefore often much more extensive: sugar cane, coconut trees, etc. (Hayami et al. 1990). Fairly discreet on Luzon island, that movement was much more obvious on the islands of Negros and Mindanao. The rise in cereal production was therefore not able to keep up with the increase in the demand for rice and corn induced by demographic growth and the rise in landless animal raising and the country had to once again call on cereal imports as from 1983, to meet the growing domestic needs.

39The problem is that in the Philippines there are still major plantations on which owners have only slightly intensified the farming systems and therefore only offer a limited number of jobs. All the provinces have indeed not benefited from the agrarian reform in the same way. The reform continues, in fact, to exclude vast agro-export plantations from the scope of redistribution. In order to avoid breaking them up, considered as harmful to their “modernization”, the law especially provides for distributing shares to farm workers and hence involving them in the farm’s profits. As a result, the agrarian reform actually remains very widely incomplete and many regions still suffer from the very high level of land concentration left over from colonization, from the penetration of major transnational companies and the hold exerted by usurious merchants on farmers who have been unable to reimburse their past debts.

40The major sugar cane haciendas have not yet all been concerned by the reform, far from it, and in particular in the Visayan islands where many sugar estates are still operated via sharecropping with peasants forced to give a percentage of their harvests to absentee owners. The major sugar cane planters must now take into account the competition caused by the arrival of corn syrup (or isoglucose) and artificial sweeteners on the international market; and without a doubt they will not succeed in making their capital investments profitable with more work-intensive cropping systems. As for the major coconut plantations, they are threatened by the recent authorization to grow, in the United States, transgenic rapeseed capable of supplying oil as rich in lauric acid as coconut oil and which, for that reason, has become perfectly useable in soap manufacturing (Kaosa-ard and Rerkasem 2000). How can these plantations where harvests are still done by hand resist competition from highly power-driven farms? Yet the issue is to know whether (or not) it will be worthwhile for the major plantation owners, subjected to this new competition, to reconvert their farming systems without the threat of expropriation due to the agrarian reform weighing them down.

41Major capitalist farms with salaried workers also prevail very widely at present on the islands of Negros and Mindanao. Plantations specialized in hevea, banana and pineapple crops for export still remain, for the most part, under direct control of transnational companies (Goodyear Tires, United Brands, Del Monte, Castle and Cooke…), which generally subcontract the actual production to national firms employing a more or less seasonal wage-earning workforce (Boyce 1993). The fact is that managers of major agro-export operations have only diversified their activities very slightly and still stick to extensive farming systems that generate few jobs, even when price trends are not favorable for them. As such, this accounts for the continuation of extensive bovine raising, for example, on huge land estates on Masbate island.

42The reasons given most frequently for not involving major land estates in agrarian reform concern the fear of undergoing a sharp drop in work productivity and the competitiveness of agro-industrial companies due to the disappearance of scale economies that would be caused, or so, it is said, by splitting up major estates. However, that means forgetting that the excessive specialization of plantations, the mechanization of many farm chores and the sometimes excessive use of phytosanitary products, are done to the detriment of permanent employment and farm intensification, often with negative effects on the ecological environment: soil erosion, chemical pollution, proliferation of insects resistant to pesticides, etc. (Tadem 1992).

43The tragedy is that these major capitalist operations with salaried workers still succeed in staying in place despite their extensive character. The added values per surface unit do indeed appear two times lower on major sugar cane and coconut plantations than on family farms devoted to those same crops in the southern provinces on Luzon island (Boyce 1993). For lack of an agrarian reform reaching out to the surface areas of those large extensive farms, many landless peasants have to give up farming and look for work in town, even before jobs have been created there in sufficient numbers. Many of them also have to resign themselves to going abroad.