We, peasant women, agricultural workers, women fishers, indigenous women, women’s organizations, land rights, and food advocates, and human rights defenders are rising against worsening landlessness, hunger, and abuses in marking International Rural Women’s Day on October 15, 2022, in line with Global Month of Solidarity with peasants.
This important day is celebrated every year to recognize the contribution of rural-based women to the attainment of household and national food security, agriculture, and economic development, but the sector remains a victim of system-wide poverty, hunger and abuses, fuelled by the chronic landlessness, oppression and exploitation, and suppression of its assertion of land rights.
The Philippines remains agricultural and agrarian, and society is semi-feudal. Landlessness or feudalism persists, where vast tracts of lands are monopoly controlled by the rich and elite few hacienderos or big landlords, compradors or middlemen of foreign monopolies, such as the cases of Hacienda Luisita and Hacienda Tinang in Tarlac province, sugarlandia in the Negros island, rice lands in Nueva Ecija, Central Luzon and Cagayan Valley regions, coconut lands in Southern Tagalog and Bicol, and plantations in the major island of Mindanao.
Toiling on these lands are Filipino farmers, significantly including the peasant women, who remain victims of exploitative relations in economic production. As big landlords and their allies fortify their control of lands, tenant families are usually reduced to being farm workers, ending up with lower shares in the harvest.
Eventually, they are displaced by the landlord, or by land grabbing, land use conversion, and other government-sponsored programs and projects under neoliberal policies. This is combined with a comprehensive approach of repression by the state, thus, they become targets of human rights abuses.
Land grabbing and land use conversion throw the rural women and their families into worsened status, with all their socio-economic and cultural rights, in bundle violated. As productive agricultural lands, coastal areas, and ancestral lands, are converted or destroyed, their right to food, livelihood, shelter, adequate standard of living, and other important rights are not just neglected, but violated. Rural women, who usually take on the tasks of feeding their children are further burdened by this systematic trend.
Rural women are again under the threat of the detrimental impact of the World Bank machination, particularly the Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling or the SPLIT Project. This aimed for the 1.368 million hectares of agrarian reform lands to be parcelized, collateralized, and disposed of, which is nothing but facilitation to the financialization or further commodification of lands into the real estate market. Consequently, this undermines the unity of agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs), and threatens the certificate of land ownership award (CLOA) to be canceled, foreclosed, or seized due to non-payment of amortizations or loans. This would lead to the reconcentration of lands, this time around, to the control of financial institutions or corporations, obviously transforming lands into mere real estate, away from its social role of being productive means of production for the rural-based sectors’ livelihood and the country’s food self-sufficiency and food sovereignty. Therefore, this is the corporatization of agrarian reform lands or the latest wave of neoliberal subversion of agrarian reform, with rural women as among the primary victims. Fortunately, many peasant women are resolutely advancing their rights to land, opposing displacement and land grabbing schemes, mainly to secure lands for food production and livelihood.
As peasant women are purposefully cultivating the lands, they are mindful of the detrimental impact of neoliberal policies and liberalization policies in agriculture. They first-hand experience depressed farm gate prices, due to the influx of imported agricultural products such as rice. They sincerely recognize that import liberalization threatens local production and food self-sufficiency. The implementation such as of the Rice Liberalization Law caused the rice farming sector more than P200 billion (USD 3.4 billion) of losses from 2019 to 2021. This brought the peasant family into a worsened state of bankruptcy, poverty, and hunger. This is exacerbated by the worsening food and economic crisis that even erodes the already depleted household incomes. As expected, peasant women are at the forefront of the struggle for food security and opposition against liberalization policies in agriculture, primarily for the repeal of the Rice Liberalization Law.
For the attainment of food self-sufficiency and food sovereignty in the country, rural women are demanding the realization of genuine agrarian reform in the country and a national and democratic framework in agriculture. They call for the urgent P15,000 production subsidies, adequate support in farm production, and provision of facilities for post-harvest and marketing, all for the clear-cut aim of realizing farm gate prices that could support their cost of living, and retail prices affordable for the poor consumers in the country. Such proposals are the meat of the Rice Industry Development Act bill or RIDA, filed in congress and primarily led by the genuine women representative and lawmaker Arlene Brosas.
As reprisal against the determined struggle of the peasant women for land rights and food sovereignty, the Philippine government treated the sector as a target for its systematic repression. Peasant women activists and leaders across the country are usual targets of gender-based and human rights abuses, harassment and red tagging, filing of trumped-up charges, extrajudicial killings, illegal arrest, and detention, forced surrenders, and other forms of violations. The bloody record of the past regime was that 44 peasant women fell victim to extrajudicial killings. Until present, there are at least 81 peasant women political prisoners namely Genalyn Avelino, Amanda Echanis, Marilyn Chiva, Marevic Aguirre, Aileen Catamin, Marilou Catamin, Eleutricia Caro, Jucie Katipunan Caro, Nona Espinosa, Azucena Garubat, Ma. Lindy Perocho, Imelda Sultan, Marivic Colito, Mylene Colito, Corazon Javier, Armogena Caballero, Margie Baylosis, Merlinda Abraham, Rea Casuyon, Melissa Comiso and others. Amid these state terror tactics, the peasant women continue to demand justice for all the victims of rights abuses and accountability of perpetrators.
It should be noted, that the state’s usual tactics of militarizing peasant communities, including house-to-house harassment and threats, rape and sexual harassment, aerial bombings, strafing of peasant houses, and detention of resident peasants, trigger mass trauma, affecting the psychological and physical health of peasant women and children. Thus, the peasant women carry on the campaign to “Stop Militarization of Peasant Communities” and “Defend the Peasant Women.”
Amid oppression and repression, peasant women are at the forefront of attaining gains and triumphs. As a result of hard-worked mass campaigns, peasant women are holding and consolidating “bungkalan” (cultivation) campaigns and setting up communal vegetable gardens as mass actions to alleviate hunger and poverty. Notable cases are the Lupang Ramos in Cavite province, Hacienda Tinang in Tarlac, and farms in Bataan, Isabela, Cagayan, Bohol, and the Bicol region. They accomplish these noble tasks amid the continued threat of displacement, harassment, and state terror, but remain to hold their line, earning them a badge of being “food security frontliners.”
The rural women in the Philippines contributed building the national movement. Peasant women in the communities are enlightened about the significance they hold in society, the economy, and politics. They contribute to the national women’s movement and take on advancing their rights in the countryside. They recognize that women’s rights are unattainable amid the operation of a social engine based on landlessness or feudalism and foreign monopoly domination that is imperialism. The emancipation of women could only be facilitated by the very emancipation from these global social cancers. The continuing building, expansion, and consolidation of the peasant women's movement, for rights to land, livelihood, and food, as the advancement of human rights, justice, and democracy, is the rural women’s contribution to the women’s movement in the country and of the whole world.
In this light, we appeal to everyone to support the aspirations and mass campaigns of the peasant women's movement, which on International Rural Women’s Day, is coined by “Stand with rural women for land, food, and justice.” ###
