Agri scheme used to evade land distribution

This refers to the letter of Lester Gueta of the National Network of Agrarian Reform Advocates-Youth (“Defying DAR, Lapanday invokes rule of law,” Opinion, 5/26/17).

Since late last year, it has been evident that vested interest groups championing unfair agribusiness venture arrangements (AVAs) have used the media to promote highly questionable AVAs as the best thing that ever happened to agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs).

This, despite the presence of empirical studies—conducted by highly respected institutions like the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), international aid and development organization Oxfam-Philippines, Development Academy of the Philippines, and the University of the Philippines’ School of Economics, to name a few—on how disadvantageous these AVAs have been to farmers who should have benefited from the government’s agrarian reform program in the
first place.

An AVA is defined as an entrepreneurial collaboration between agrarian reform beneficiaries and investors to implement an agribusiness venture involving lands distributed under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

But studies have shown that these “entrepreneurial collaborations” have been used by big landlords and foreign agricultural corporations to evade land distribution.

FAO’s 2015 “Multi-sectoral study on the Agribusiness Venture Arrangements policy and implementation Under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program,” revealed that most ARBs are not even aware of their obligations and entitlements under these AVAs because most of these provisions are written in a language they do not understand.

The study, which made an assessment of AVAs in Mindanao, added that the ARBs’ “lack of understanding is exacerbated by insufficient legal representation and transparency issues from their own cooperative leaders.”

Oxfam’s study on AVAs involving banana plantations, also in Mindanao, bared that most ARBs are “embroiled in onerous contracts with banana exporters such that they get to see very little of their hard work translated into actual economic improvement. Some have been mired in debt for years. In worse cases, they lost effective control of their lands and are relegated to being farm workers on their own land.”

The study added that the Philippine government, specifically the Department of Agrarian Reform, “failed to protect the interests of ARBs who enter into such agreements, by failing to provide legal and technical support to ARBs to ensure fairer contractual terms.”

It is, therefore, a breath of fresh air that the current DAR, through the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council, has acted on the complaints of ARBs and ARB cooperatives by revoking AVAs that have proven to be prejudicial to ARBs.

SYLVIA MALLARI, undersecretary, DAR Foreign-Assisted Special Projects Office, and concurrent OIC-director, Public Assistance and Media Relations Service, Department of Agrarian Reform