An Open Letter to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo from the Farmers Without Land,

Masses Without Food on the Table   

On the occasion of the 8th State of the Nation Address of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on July 28, 2008, this Open Letter is sent to Her Excellency:


Dear Mrs. President:

We are called tillers of the land. From our sweat and blood, from our wrinkled hands comes the food that feeds this nation.

Or at least, this should be the case.

What has happened to the tillers of the soil, to us you fondly called the “masses”?

Farmers we may be called but we have lost our lands to corporate greed. Our dignity has been stolen over years of servitude to landed elites who flank this government’s ring of power and influence.

What now Mrs. President of your SONA promises wherein you promised cheap rice and a prosperous farmer, rice self-sufficiency, and the increased income and harvest of the rural folks?

This regime did nothing to alleviate poverty wrought by centuries of landlessness. Band-aid solutions and dole outs did nothing to realize your promises of prosperity. You lifted not a finger to change our pitiable situation under a fake-and-deceitful Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP). Instead, you have allowed the small percentage of rich-and-landed families, with whom you belong, the monopoly of vast tracks of lands.

CARP beneficiaries has been tied to their necks paying for high amortization rates while those who acquired small parcels of land are left without government subsidy as millions of supposed loan fund for farmers such as the P700-Million fertilizer fund scam and the P3-Billion grand swine scam have been used to oil electoral campaign machineries or to bribe the gluttons in government and military, the only people whom we say you have protected and served.

Seven years under your regime has made CARP instrumental in the swift disenfranchisement of peasants’ lands. Plunder of our lands and resources exacerbated under Arroyo, “the economist’s” Medium Term Development Plan, the local expression of a neo-liberal policy dictated by the GATT – WTO and other capitalist countries and institutions.

Your administration has encouraged the stagnation of the country’s agricultural industry which has slackened to a more appalling condition as the country’s dependence on importation and reliance on exportation heightened, primarily on the importation of rice and the export of cash crops intended for the foreign market.

You have been the primary agent in the surrender our lands and patrimony to foreign plunder as your flagship development program, clearly marked with dogged obeisance to foreign interest, has hastened and become more blatant.

We have lost our lands to plantations now owned and run by multinational and transnational companies –-- of bananas, pineapples, rubber and jathropa --- which have transformed thousands of hectares of rice lands, thereby dislocating farmers and indigenous folks and destroying farmlands.

Land use and crop conversion, which is the core of the highly-denounced Japan-Philippine Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA) which your administration is then again insisting on in the Senate despite the peoples’ opposition, has turned farmers into paid farm laborers who have been rendered to abuse and the exploitation due to extremely low wages.

At the wake of the national economic crisis your administration has brought this country into, your iron-fisted policy has mercilessly snuffed out the voices of resistance from among us who dare to speak, who dare to fight for land, for what is due our toil.

Since 2001, 105 farmer leaders under KMP have been slain by your mercenaries in the military. Until now, we grieve and draw strength from the death of our leader and colleague Celso Pojas, former KMP Spokesperson.

As we clamor for justice over his death, and the death of hundred others whose lives were unjustly and brutally taken, mark our words when we say that the millions of farmers whose lands, their blood and soul, you have sold to the devil, will claim their just retribution.

Farmers, we urge you, with your hunger, your grief, your will to fight for what is rightly ours, join the Filipino peoples’ fight for genuine democracy and freedom.

Defend the farmer’s rights to land and genuine land reform!

End the repression against farmers, and the rural poor!

Justice for peasant martyr Celso Pojas and all victims of extrajudicial killings under this dangerous regime!

Very respectfully yours,

(Signed:)

Pedro Arnadao

Vice-Chairperson,

Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas – Southern Mindanao Region

(For and on behalf of the KMP Executive Council)
Maa Rd., Davao City
fa_dc@yahoo.com