AT A MEETING OF BISHOPS AND LEGISLATORS AT THE Pope Pius XII Center last May 6, Sen. Nene Pimentel said he was sorry there was little talk now about social justice in land reform matters. He thought it would help, for example, in setting guidelines for how much money should be paid to rich families for their land. “Why pay big money to people who are already rich?” he asked. Bishop Teodoro Bacani said the notion of common good was also absent from recent discussions and it, too, could help in the matter of assessing payment.
Not only are arguments from social justice and common good missing from recent land reform discussions; so, too, are most of the economic, political and social arguments once used to justify land reform. Perhaps there is no need for them anymore: land reform is up and running—with a life of its own. But don’t throw away the old arguments. They are needed now for urban land reform.
Urban land reform is not a new idea. The 1987 Constitution, in the same Article that calls for rural land reform, declares “the state shall undertake in cooperation with the private sector a continuing program of urban land reform …” (Art. XIII, Sec. 9) For years this constitutional provision has been overshadowed by its rural elder brother, but now its time has come. One NGO leader said with some exaggeration: “Rural land reform is the past. The future is urban land reform.”
When land reform was first discussed in the 1930s, there hardly existed landless poor people in the cities. Now the urban poor number 21 million, according to the UN Habitat (2007) and in many ways their situation is more dire and calls for more drastic measures.
Some steps have been taken since 1987. The Community Mortgage Program, which was developed under former HUDCC (Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council) Chair Teodoro Katigbak in 1988, has provided land for about 200,000 families. The government buys land from private owners and resells to the poor as a group, hence the word “community.”
Land proclamations issued by President Macapagal-Arroyo in 2001-2004 benefited about 200,000 families. This program doesn’t give a family a legal right to a piece of land, but the family can’t be evicted. There is a promise that government will give the land. It is a first step in what could be a good urban land reform effort.
So all in all, we have 400,000 families that have benefited over a 20-year period. Urban land reform has benefited .05 percent of them.
But why give land to urban poor people in the first place? The old land reform arguments may still be useful here.
Social justice and the common good arguments start with the belief that God created the world for all people to share and that no one should have too much of any asset while others have nothing. “There is enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for anyone’s greed,” Gandhi said. Why should the hacienda owner have 500 hectares and live royally while the tillers have nothing, the advocates of rural land reform argued.
Today, the argument is as forceful: Why should individuals have so much urban land that they can develop into golf courses while the urban poor live huddled, 500-1,000 families a hectare, in the slums?
We must share the idle land or change the use of urban lands. There must be laws to guide the process, such as, those of Brazil. By the way the late, famed Archbishop Helder Camara of Recife, Brazil was a pioneer in demanding a more just use of urban land.
An argument against land reform in rural areas was that it was poor economics and production would slip. Production don’t slip, it has turned out, if the farmers have proper inputs. Arguments have to be made now by experts to show that land given to the poor, who then build working family communities with basic services, playgrounds, lawns and flowers, where old people can sit in front of their houses and watch the children play, where people engage actively in public affairs and politics, is a much better economic and social use of land in the long run than luxury housing and malls.
Such communities can be the backbone of democracy. All they need is stability or land tenure security.
The struggle of the urban poor now is far down the road from any form of comprehensive urban land reform. The poor are working just to get government agencies to follow the Constitution (evictions must be done in a legal and humane way, Art. XIII, 9) and the international covenants the country has signed; and also not to get evicted without decent relocation. Most agencies who evict people do so now without relocating them. The families are simply left in the streets to survive any way they can. Or they are given some money to go away quietly. There are thousands of these families along the esteros in Manila and Pasig, along Agham Road, and in Tatalon.
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Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His email address is upa@pldtdsl.net.
