ASCOT Library Zabali Campus

Part I. Perspectives from the household level. –
Chapter 1 Labor income and credit needs of the Sumagaysay family. –
Family profile. –
The Sagod system and household income. –
Household expenditures. –
Credit needs. –
Prospects and credit alternatives. –
Chapter 2 Labor allocation under the Sagod system. –
Household characteristics. –
Family work force and the Sagod system. –
Labor allocation by source and economic activity. –
Rice farming. –
Other agricultural activities. –
Nonagricultural activities. –
Landless workers on rice farms. –
Labor allocation by rice farming operation. –
Weeding and plant care. –
Harvest and postharvest operations. –
The employment issue - some considerations. –
Alternative farming practices. –
Degree of employment on rice farms. –
Wage rates under the sagod system. –
The sagod system in retrospect. –
Chapter 3 Household income, expenses, and credit practices. –
Patterns in cash and palay flows. –
Sources of gross income. –
Expenditures. –
Consumption expenses. –
Production expenses. –
Net income and consumption levels. –
Monthly net income and savings. –
Per capita consumption levels. –
Credit practices. –
Directions of credit. –
Credit cycles. –
Profiles of landless workers and rice farmers. –
Economic parameters. –
Average productivity. –
Low-level equilibrium. –
Chapter 4 Land and tenure change in the Pelayo family. –
Lolo Miguel's family. –
Share tenancy and traditional rice farming. –
Sharing arrangements. –
Traditional rice farming practices. –
Land fragmentation. –
Technological changes on Ricardo's farm. –
Yield-increasing technology. –
Labor-saving and cost-saving technology. –
Peasant organizations and tenure change. –
Early land conflicts. –
Operation land transfer. –
Samahang Nayon. –
The Barrio Committee on Land Production. –
Operation leasehold. –
A generation of leaves. –
Children's education from the rice harvest. –
Debt financing. –
Prospects and aspirations. –
Part II. Agrarian reform in two villages. –
Chapter 5 Land tenure reform: scope and opposition. –
Operation land transfer. –
Operation leasehold. –
Study setting. –
Barangay Rajal Sur. –
Village profiles. –
Tenure differentiation. –
Dominant tenure. –
Certificates of land transfer. –
Nonfarm and secondary occupations. –
Mobility of tenure. –
Manner of farm acquisition. –
Diminishing farm sizes. –
Big and small landlords. –
Size category and place of residence. –
Landlord case illustrations. –
Jose Quimpo. –
Mariano Cancio. –
Juan and Conrado Pili. –
Mirasol Corporation. –
Landlords-turned-entrepreneurs. –
The equity issue: some considerations. –
Distribution of landholdings. –
The dilemma of permanent leasehold. –
Landless rural workers. –
Chapter 6 Small rice farmers under agrarian reform. –
Variability in crop yields. –
Costs, returns, and land rentals. –
Share-tenants vis-a-vis other tenure groups. –
Land rentals based on the comun harvest. –
Land rentals vis-avis net harvests. –
Participants in rice production. –
Farm plans: preharvest and postharvest expenses. –
Disposal of palay harvested. –
Marketing and credit problems. –
Fluctuating rice prices. –
Farmer's credit organizations. –
Agrarian reform within a village rice economy. –
Fixed rental or amortization payment? –
Leasehold or share tenancy? –
Family labor or hired labor? –
Chapter 7 Profiles of peasant subclasses. –
Household biodata. –
Age of head and household size. –
Educational level of household head. –
Origins. –
Socioeconomic indicators. –
Type of housing. –
Home lot tenure. –
Source of drinking water. –
Consumer durables and farm items. –
Tenure and age. –
Access to public services. –
Children's education. –
Institutional credit sources. –
Membership in local organizations. –
Attitudes and aspirations. –
Security of tenure. –
The children's future. –
Household economy. –
Part III. Implications for the Philippine agrarian reform program.
Chapter 8 Stratification of the peasantry. –
Landless rural workers. –
Tenant farmers under agrarian reform. –
Emerging issues in agrarian reform. –
land to the tiller and landless workers. –
Owner-cultivatorship and permanent lessees. –
Family-size farms and amortizing owners. –
Chapter 9 Seven years of land tenure reform. –
Target beneficiaries. –
Five steps in operation land transfer. –
Major obstacles in implementation. –
Social impact of agrarian reform. –
National estimates. –
Involution or stratification. –
Alternative courses of action.

"Since the mid-1960s, rice farming areas in the Philippines have under- gone perceptible, even dramatic, changes as a result of modern rice technology and agrarian reform. The modern technology has increased rice production; agrarian reform has worked for a more equitable distribution of income and land resources for the tillers of the soil. Increased productivity and equity, through technological and institutional innovations, were thus interrelated in the economic and social development of rice-growing areas.
In 1972, the Philippines' agrarian reform program was extended to all tenant- farmed rice- and maize-growing areas. Share tenancy was officially abolished. Operation Land Transfer (OLT) was initiated to dis- tribute Certificates of Land Transfer (CLT) to eligible rice and maize share-tenants. These tenants became amortizing owners. By 1974 Operation Leasehold (LHO) started fixing leasehold status for share- tenants of small landlords those exempt from OLT because they owned 7 ha or less of tenanted rice- and maize-growing lands.
The agrarian reform program did not, however, include the landless rural workers, a "non-tenure" group in the reform areas. The official assumption was that rural communities were relatively homogenous or, at worst, two-class societies made up of landlords and tenants.
The approach I have taken is to assess the impact of the institutional and the technological changes on all peasant groups within the same rice-growing villages. There are three parts to the study:
• The first examines the basic differences between landless workers and tenant farmers in terms of labor allocation, household economy, and security of tenure.
• The second focuses on the incipient formation of three major peasant groups under agrarian reform amortizing owners, permanent lessees, and landless workers. These groups constitute the bottom strata of rural society. They all work on the land but have different legal or moral claims and aspirations for eventual land- ownership under the agrarian reform program.
• The third tries to shed light on problem areas in agrarian reform, particularly as they pertain to the interactions between landless workers and tenant farmers or among the three emerging peasant groups. It also leads to a re-examination of agrarian reform policies-in the short run as well as in the long run.
THE LITERATURE ON AGRARIAN REFORM
Throughout this text, the term rice farmer is synonymous with small farmer, tenant farmer, tenant tiller, or agrarian reform beneficiary. As an inclusive term, small farmer is often used in rural development literature to refer to farmers with limited landholdings and often characterized as operating a family-size farm. It also refers to subsistence or marginal farmers, irrespective of their tenure status.
Tenant farmer or tenant tiller, on the other hand, excludes landlords and owner-cultivators and focuses on farmers with tenancy rights to work the land. The Philippine Ministry of Agrarian Reform uses tenant tiller in its identification and enumeration of tenants, whether share tenants or lessees. Tenant farmers become agrarian reform beneficiaries when they become amortizing owners under OLT or lessees under LHO.
In a restricted sense then, rice farmers in this study refers to agrarian reform beneficiaries - whether amortizing owners or lessees, or both. Amortizing owners is the official term used in government documents to designate rice and maize farmer-tenants who have been deemed as owners of the land they worked as tenants. Amortizing owners are in a wide sense all CLT recipients and in a narrow sense those who have started amortization payments based on the agreed price of the land. These payments are to be paid over the next 15 years. In the absence of land valuation proceedings, a CLT recipient's lease rentals since October 1972 would be considered partial payments for the land (Estrella 1978).
The principal objective of OLT is to transform tenants into amortizing owners. Several studies of the tenure status of amortizing owners have either compared reform beneficiaries with small landowners (Nicolas 1974, Flores and Clemente 1975), or studied CLT recipients as a single group (Montemayor and Escueta 1977, Sodusta 1977) or examined their situation from two points in time (Angsico 1978, San Andres and Illo 1978). The nearest to a cross-tenure comparison of small farmers is a study of Nueva Ecija farmers by Mangahas et al (1974). In their study, however, lessees before 1972 were used as proxies for amortizing owners after 1972; no separate category for permanent lessees after 1972 was included.
Permanent lessees after 1972, a second group for comparison in this study, should be distinguished from share-tenants who became lessees before 1972. In the pre-1972 reform program, all lessees were seen as occupying an intermediate stage between share-tenant and owner- operator. The post-1972 reform program, however, gives lessees under LHO a definite ceiling on their aspirations for landownership. Unlike CLT recipients, lessees' fixed rentals are not considered partial payments for the land. With the present coverage of OLT stalemated at the small landlords' retention limit of 7 ha, the Ministry of Agrarian Reform (MAR) has estimated that 61% of all rice- and maize-farm tenants would actually be covered by LHO rather than by OLT.
Although lessees under LHO are not considered permanent by the MAR, they are, for all practical purposes, permanent in two related senses:
- they are protected by government decree against eviction from their present landholdings, but
- they must pay a fixed rental for use of the land, and cannot hope to become landowners.
The pre-1972 studies on lessees should be considered in the light of the crucial difference between lessees who become owners and permanent lessees whose aspirations for landownership have been blocked by the OLT exemption granted to small landlords. For instance, Takahashi (1972) noted a perceptible improvement in the life styles of sharecroppers-turned-lessees in a Bulacan barrio. Those lessees, it seems, behaved as amortizing owners. Would permanent lessees after 1972 also behave in the same manner? Fegan (1972a) mentioned obstacles raised by landlords against tenants-turned-lessees. Would these same obstacles be raised in 1980, or would landlords be more kindly disposed toward permanent lessees than to amortizing owners on their lands?
Landless rural workers have been described in various ways (Makil and Fermin 1978). In my operational definition, they are landless because they have neither ownership nor tenancy rights to the land, rural because their employment is mostly in agriculture, and workers because their income is principally from their toil.
Because they have no clear-cut rights to the land under agrarian reform, landless workers constitute an amorphous and shifting group in peasant society. It has been suggested that present policies of agrarian reform and rural development adversely affect landless workers' access to credit, extension services, and other government programs (Zimmerly 1976). Referring to the plight of landless agricultural workers, Harkin (1975) observes:
It is important that research carefully assess the impact of land reform on this group-one of the most vulnerable economic classes in the Philippines. If ownership of land by the tenant is successful in encouraging him to substitute his own family's labor for hired labor, then the plight of the landless agricultural workers may be aggravated.
The same observation was made by Takahashi (1972) in his study of successful lessees vis-a-vis hired agricultural workers. On the other hand, other studies indicate that enterprising lessees and amortizing owners may explore employment opportunities elsewhere while operating their farms through hired labor (Barker and Cordova 1976, Smith and Gascon 1979).
Harkin (1975) suggests that unless the present agrarian reform program provides for landless workers, "this generation's land reform beneficiaries will become the next generation's landlords." Others suggest that the presence of landless workers in the rural areas makes it difficult for agrarian reform beneficiaries to be strictly "business- minded" in their farm operations and increases the likelihood for subtenancy relationships to arise (Fegan 1972b; Kikuchi et al 1977a, b).
As a point of comparison, it is instructive to note that China's land reform program in the early 1950s included the landless rural workers as one of the principal beneficiaries of land redistribution. In the Philip- pine case, landless workers are still largely an unidentified group.
Finally, peasant subclasses is a term that connotes both the similarities and the differences among amortizing owners, permanent lessees, and landless workers. All, as peasants, are composed of small farmers, who till the land as their major source of livelihood and have been engaged in subsistence farming with varying degrees of market orientation (Shanin 1971). But, differences in tenure status-in terms of rights to the land, rights to the harvest, rights to infrastructure services, and even rights to be organized and recognized by government - may have formed subdivisions among the peasant class and brought about a stratification of the peasantry.
Various classifications have been suggested to denote this stratification of the peasantry. Wolf (1969) suggested rich, middle, and poor peasants. In the Philippine setting, Takahashi (1972) pointed out an increasing peasantization of agrarian reform beneficiaries in contrast to the rural proletariat. Umehara (1974) studied the heterogeneity of the peasant class within a hacienda barrio in Nueva Ecija and noted new dominance-dependence relationships between permanent and casual workers. The literature contains nothing, however, on the implications of the formation of peasant subclasses under the present agrarian reform program in the Philippines.
Two villages were selected for my study. One was a focal point for intensive study, and the other provided a basis for comparison. The villages were in Iloilo and Nueva Ecija, leading provinces in terms of rice production and agrarian reform implementation. Each village was within the scope of infrastructure development projects (e.g. irrigation and farm-to-market roads) and development programs (e.g. Samahang Nayon and Masagana 99). In each village, amortizing owners, permanent lessees, and landless workers each constituted at least 10% of the total households.
The figure that follows indicates the linkages of the various research methods used. From detailed case studies of 2 families, the scope was widened to 16 households engaged in daily record keeping for 1 crop season, and finally extended to the entire village by means of a total household survey. The same household survey in Iloilo was made in another village in Nueva Ecija for purposes of comparing two sets of peasant subclasses. I started the research in May 1977 with unstructured interviews of key respondents during a 2-week stay in the Iloilo village. In August and September field interviewers did household surveys of the two villages while I started the case study of a landless worker's family.
Sixteen households in the Iloilo village kept daily records from September 1977 to March 1978. I visited them periodically while making a case study of a small farmer's family. At various times between 1977 and 1979, small samples of rice farmers in the study villages were inter- viewed to gather information on farm management and productivity.
My approach to the study was phenomenological-from the particular to the general, from one household to several households, and from several households to the entire village community. On a quantitative level, the village surveys complemented the case studies of individual households - the latter being treated not so much as unique cases but as approximations of the "concrete universal."
Part I portrays the dynamics of rural life in a single village from the perspectives of individual actors and households. In this sense, it can be read as a complete narrative in itself. It focuses on the basic differences between landless workers and rice farmers - during and even before agrarian reform implementation.
Chapter 1 describes the life situation of a landless worker's family, particularly the dynamics of their labor arrangement and its bearing on the household's economy.
Chapter 2 expands on the topic of labor allocation by analyzing the daily record-keeping data of eight landless worker households vis-a-vis eight rice farmer households.
Chapter 3 complements these labor data by examining the corresponding socioeconomic situation of the record-keeping households in terms of income, expenses, and credit practices.
Chapter 4 presents a case study of a tenant farmer and his family across generations. In the process, a history of the institutional and technological changes that have occurred in the principal study village is depicted from the viewpoint of the family members.
Part II examines the formation of three recognizable peasant sub- classes after the initiation of agrarian reform. Shifting from the household to the village level, I utilize mostly survey data from the two study villages.
Chapter 5 carries forward the discussion of tenure change in one family to tenure differentiation in the two villages. It also includes case illustrations of small and large landlords in the principal study village a complementary perspective to the earlier case studies of landless workers and tenant farmers.
Chapter 6 examines the economic viability of tenant farmers under agrarian reform and with the new rice technology. It also expands on topics first discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 such as farming expenses and the income situation of rice farmers.
Profiles of the three major peasant subclasses are drawn in Chapter 7. Assuming the official distinctions among amortizing owners, permanent lessees, and landless workers, the section points out whether significant differences do exist among the three peasant subclasses. The qualitative aspects of the survey are included in a section on attitudes and aspirations.
Seen from an institutional framework, the three chapters of Part II deal successively with the political, economic, and social aspects of agrarian reform.
Part III presents the findings of the field research and my conclusions. Moving from the village to the national level, I include implications for the current Philippine agrarian reform program.
Chapter 8 summarizes the salient characteristics of landless workers and rice farmers and raises issues related to the stratification of the peasantry under agrarian reform. In the light of these issues, Chapter 9 examines the 7-year record of land tenure reform in the Philippines. It points out some major obstacles to implementation, the likely social impact of agrarian reform, and alternative courses of action."