Message from the top on Hacienda Luisita
Today the monumental Supreme Court decision that ordered the redistribution of land at Hacienda Luisita is a week old, waiting for the cumbersome machinery of the government to swing into action to implement the decision.
It is only the beginning of the process to dismantle the stock distribution option (SDO) installed by former President Cory Aquino in 1989, only a year after the enactment in June 1988 of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law. CARL laid down the social policy on redistribution of agricultural lands from the hands of landlords to farm workers tilling the soil. The high court’s decision of Nov. 22 emphatically struck down the SDO, pronouncing it as a spurious corporate mechanism that vitiated the state policy which states that “control over agricultural lands must always be in the hands of farmers.” The scheme, which allowed Hacienda Luisita to evade for more than 20 years the transfer of the estate’s land holdings to its workers, has to go, the high court said, after finding that “upon review of the facts and circumstances, we realize that FWBs (farmworker-beneficiaries) will never have control over these agricultural lands for as long as they remain stockholders of HLI [Hacienda Luisita Inc.].”
The decision has put President Aquino on the spot. A second-generation scion of the powerful Aquino-Cojuangco dynasty, Mr. Aquino has called for obedience to the decision, while reminding us that he had divested himself of his one-percent share of stocks in Hacienda Luisita.
Mr. Aquino faces the painful task of pulling down the structure of the SDO scheme, a legacy of his mother. The high court’s decision has received broad public approval. It voted 14-0, in a rare unanimous decision, against the background of the heightening tensions between the President and the Supreme Court, which is packed with appointees of the previous Arroyo administration, over cases related to the campaign of the Aquino administration to make Arroyo accountable for alleged election rigging in 2004 and 2007 and a number of allegedly corruption-ridden transactions. The high court’s decision on the administration’s actions arising from its campaign has dented its credibility.
Despite the credibility issue, the government has accepted the unanimous decision on the Hacienda Luisita SDO, putting both the administration and the high court on the side of the farmers. But not many expect that a mere judicial declaration will work wonders and overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of the eventual enjoyment by the farmers of the benefits of land ownership. Many of these obstacles pose a litmus test of Mr. Aquino’s political will to dismantle the SDO at Luisita.
How the decision is implemented is a legitimate area for the press to examine rigorously to determine whether the government is putting its weight behind the objectives of CARP in giving the farmers social justice against possible obstruction by the landlords.
The purpose of this article is not to prejudge Mr. Aquino’s exercise of political will in implementing the high court’s decision. Rather we seek to identify some of the issues involved in the dismantling of the SDO to prevent sanguine expectations by the peasantry for overnight results from land transfer.
The first reaction of the President to the decision came on Nov. 25. He told reporters, “You comply when the Supreme Court makes an order. That should be the case. They decide on a question of law. I don’t think that’s optional.” But he qualified the statement with a significant caveat. He said, agrarian reform sought to achieve two things: to “empower farmers” but to ensure that landowner are “justly compensated.”
“Farmers need to be empowered so that they can have their own lands to till,” he said. “But agrarian reform has a second part. Let us not deplete capital. That means there should be just compensation so that the owners of land do not end up having their land taken from them, that they are rightly paid. The capital that is returned can be invested in other industries that can help create more jobs in the country.”
This is painting a Potemkin Village scenario. The President’s statement is a variant of the standard and hoary landlord argument that we don’t make the poor rich by robbing the rich.
What is “just compensation”? This issue comes up probably as the most contentious to be addressed after the high court’s decision. It ruled that HLI is entitled to just compensation for agricultural land to be reckoned from Nov. 21, 1989, when the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council (PARC) issued a resolution ordering the Department of Agrarian Reform and Land Bank of the Philippines to determine the compensation due to HLI.
Estimates of the compensation vary widely. Based on separate opinions, some justices would peg the compensation at 1989 prices, which would amount to only P170,000 per hectare. Hacienda Luisita, however, was paid P1 million per hectare in 2005 for the 85.5 hectares for the right of way it extended to the SCTEX.
Although HLI lawyers said they would “abide by” the decision of the high court, they are preparing to fight tooth and nail in legal battles over compensation. At some point, the issue will eventually be elevated to the PARC, of which the President is chairman. On that stage, Mr. Aquino can no longer distance himself from the controversy and say let us leave the resolution to the proper bureaucratic institutions. He cannot escape making a choice between the interests of his family dynasty in Luisita and those of its farmer workers.
When that moment comes, there will be gnashing of teeth.
