On CARP Extension

EXTENDING THE COMPREHENSIVE AGRARIAN REFORM PROGRAM
December 15, 2008


THE PARTIDO DEMOKRATIKO SOSYALISTA NG PILIPINAS (PDSP) manifests its support for the extension of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law as it joins other groups in urging our lawmakers not to kill the program. Our quest for genuine agrarian reform impels us to take this position.

We are not abandoning our stance that we need a paradigm shift in agrarian reform. On the contrary, we are affirming it.

After 20 years of implementation, twice as long as it was targeted to be, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program has largely failed to achieve its objectives. Up to now, it has not completed its land reform component, partly because CARL was made full of loopholes by those who crafted it and largely because of the fierce resistance of big landowners. More importantly, CARP has failed to significantly uplift the lives of its farmer-beneficiaries, much less bring about rural development and fuel agro-based industrialization. CARP’s dismal failure in its economic objectives makes imperative the review of the wisdom, especially in this era of global economy, of cutting up big agricultural lands into small lots and distributing them among farmers with meager means, if at all, to make them productive.

There should be a better way of making land, which is a finite resource, serve the needs of the whole society and the generations to come. There should be a kind of agrarian reform that will not hamper but bring about increased productivity to the land, better lives to the tillers, development to the countryside and industrialization to the country.

Despite the failures of CARP, however, we maintain that as a social justice measure, it is a
collective achievement of our peasantry and other social reform advocates. It is a gain by our poor’s struggle for social justice that should not be thrown away by our lawmakers.

We support the extension of CARP even as we push for a thorough review and evaluation of the program with the end in view of instituting reforms that will address its weaknesses.