THE Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) called on the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) to rethink their position on what it described as a “bogus and anti-peasant Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms (Carper).”
The KMP issued the statement after reports said that 78 bishops of the CBCP have signed an urgent appeal to President Aquino to take decisive action and revamp the leadership of the Department of Agrarian Refom (DAR).
“We are one with all farmers in the struggle and legitimate demand for land. But with all due respect to our bishops, CARPER is not a land reform program. It is an instrument of big landlords to strengthen their monopoly and control over the lands,” said KMP spokesperson Antonio Flores.
“After 25 year of the bogus CARPER and 14 DAR secretaries since CARP’s enactment in 1988, the Filipino peasantry remains landless because the problem lies with the program itself. As long as the sham CARPER remains as the program being implemented, agrarian reform will be in perpetual crisis and every DAR secretary will surely fail,” the KMP leader said.
Flores said that “it is high-time for the CBCP to rethink its position on the bogus and anti-peasant CARP. This anti-peasant law was originally designed and enacted by President Aquino’s family in 1988 to exempt Hacienda Luisita and vast tracts of lands from distribution.”
“The seemingly endless farmers’ marches, farm strikes and cultivation campaigns, camp-outs and hunger strikes are living testaments that the Carper is failed in addressing the peasantry’s demand for land. The case of the Negros farmers, Hacienda Luisita, Hacienda Looc in Batangas, Roxas-Araneta lands in Bulacan, among others, are concrete cases where landlords made use of the Carper to evade land distribution,” Flores stressed adding: “These agrarian disputes will surely outlive the bogus CARPER in 2014.”
The group insisted that “the sham CARP is the main culprit in the worsening land problem and landlessness of the peasantry.”
The peasant group is pushing for the enactment of the House Bill 374 or the Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill (GARB) seeking the free distribution of lands to landless tillers.
“Only a genuine agrarian reform program that will break the monopoly and control of big landlords over vast tracts of lands and haciendas and its subsequent free distribution to landless tillers will solve the centuries-old landlessness of peasants in the country,” he said.