THE United Nations declared 2019-2028 as the “Decade of Family Farming,” highlighting the important role that small rural producers play in addressing concerns on food security and sovereignty, climate change, social inequalities, and the oppressive structures that characterize the agrarian sector.
Philippine agriculture, of which family farms constitute over 81% of total farm area, has been on a steep decline, however, in relation to other economic sectors. While it contributes about 35% (directly and indirectly) to the country’s gross domestic product, its share of the national budget has been a measly 2% over the last ten years. Support services have been inadequate, processing and marketing remain underdeveloped, farmgate prices could hardly keep up with production costs, and environmental degradation hampers production of farm goods. Its social structure is highly unequal, with only a few benefiting from the wealth agriculture produces.
Moreover, several “pandemics” have confronted farmer households and other rural communities, rendering their situation highly critical and, possibly, terminal.
Firstly, the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted smallholder farmers in the following: a drastic decrease in the already small incomes due to lower crop prices, threats to food security and other basic needs, and reduction in investments in their farms leading to lower yields. Their health needs are also compromised as the government give priority to urban areas in the distribution of amelioration aid and in the rollout of vaccines.
Secondly, there is the longrunning pandemic resulting from the country’s membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) since 1995. Successive Philippine governments have gone overboard in uncritically embracing its free market and free trade provisions without considering their impact on marginalized rural populations. This has resulted in the country becoming a dumping ground for cheap surplus agricultural imports, depressing local farm gate prices further, and increasing rural poverty.
The third pandemic lies in the poor performance of the five-decades long agrarian reform program. Several large landholdings have remained untouched or their status unresolved. Land conversions continue unabated, especially by giant property rms. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of land have yet to be distributed even as second-rate public lands are given priority. Legal challenges from landowners have created implementation bottlenecks. Support services have been lacking, leading agrarian reform beneficiaries to mortgage their awarded lands to the rural rich. Violence, harassment and Redtagging against family farmers have increased; in the last four years, nearly 300 farmers, land activists, sher folk and indigenous people have been killed.
The fourth pandemic affects small fisherfolks who suffer from continued encroachments into their traditional fishing areas by big fishing companies that also deplete marine resources through destructive and unsustainable fishing methods. With the four-month closed season for fishing in major waters in Mindanao and the Visayas, many small fishers are deprived of their main source of income while being penalized for the wrongdoing of big fishers.
The fifth pandemic sees indigenous peoples finding little comfort in the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act as many communities still have to gain legal rights to their ancestral lands. Those who have done so, however, face loss of control over their lands and displacement from speculative investors, property developers and special economic zones.
Disastrous 2019 Rice Tarif cation
Law whose repeal farmers’ and support groups have been demanding. In the two years since its promulgation, the law has not ful lled any of its promised benefits in terms of higher incomes for farmers, lower rice prices for consumers, and reduced government spending. In the meantime, the situation of rice farmer households has gone from bad to worse.
The last pandemic is the threat to family farms from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) which will further entrench trade liberalization and expose small producers to unfair competition from big national and international players. The RCEP will be the final nail in the agricultural coffin that the WTO and other unequal trade agreements have built.
From November 2020 to November 2021, more than half a million farmers in India pitched camps at the borders of New Delhi to denounce three farm laws that would lead to a corporate takeover of agriculture and deny the farmers a minimum support price for their produce. State forces failed to disperse the farmers but about 740 of them died from the cold, the heat, Covid, and suicides. On November 19, 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi acknowledged defeat and announced the repeal of the controversial farm laws.
Filipino farmers and their supporters could take inspiration from and emulate the example offered by the heroic farmers of India in order to address the multiple pandemics that affect their daily lives
With the May 2022 elections approaching to choose the highest leaders of the land, Filipino small-scale farmers and their allies must demand concrete solutions and a meaningful electoral platform from candidates while examining their track records in confronting the multiple problems of the agrarian sector, rural and agricultural development, and the plight of direct producers.
(This piece was part of Eduardo C. Tadem’s solidarity message to the Knowledge Learning Market and and Policy Engagement (KLMPE 2021), a platform on best practices in agriculture and rural development, on Dec. 9, 2021.