In this Episode Nicole becomes a Rice Farmer

---

---

I, in fact, make a pretty terrible rice farmer. I don't do 5 am happily, I am allergic to the bugs, and as my parents will tell you, I never was willing to help weed the garden. However, I discovered this week during my peasant exposure, that there are also openings for rice farmer/political organizers, I might do alright as one of those.

I spent this past week living with a couple of different families in the infamous Hacienda Luisita. Though it is almost unheard of in Canada, this might be the most well known piece of land in the Philippines.

The Hacienda is a 7000 hectare piece of land in Tarlac Province which lies in Central Luzon. The history of Hacienda Luisita is long and complicated. Even those people who tried to explain it to me in brief start the story in 1957. The best documentaries and books being in Tagalog, I am still a little fuzzy on all of the details of the long and draw out battle for this land myself. Anyone interested should google it, but I will give you a quick overview of what I know.

In 1957 the Cojuangco family bought the whole Hacienda from a Spanish owner who had been using it as a tobacco plantation. All of the workers lived in villages inside the Hacienda. The Cojauncos purchased it on the condition that they would give it to the farmers, who had been living on the land for generations, in 10 years. This 10 years came and went and the farmers where not given land titles. The Cojuangco family built a sugar mill and slowly converted the whole plantation into sugarcane, planting sugarcane even in spaces that the families had previously used for personal food production. By the 90s almost all of the people who live in the Hacienda's 11 villages where working for the Cojuancos in the fields or in the mill, still with no more legal right to their land then they had had in 1957. Though they had taken away all of the land previously used for rice and vegetables, the Cojuanco family started laying off workers, and bumped the workers they kept to 1-2 day work weeks. With the average pay dropping as low 10 pesos a week people experienced drastic declines in their quality of life; unable to feed their families with either home grown food or with their pay. The claim was that the Hacienda and the sugar mill where both bankrupt. This was obviously a lie, though, as the Cojuanco family continued to be one of the most financially and politically influential families in a country run by landowning families. In my opinion this artificial economic crisis in the Hacienda was a way for the Cojuanco family to control whole communities of cheap labor for sugar production. In 2005 the union of farm workers and the union of sugar mill workers with the support of all 11 baranguy councils (town councils) decided to stage a general strike. The strike line was set up in front of the main gate of the sugar mill in early November. The military arrived soon after to start trying to break the strike line with tear gas, water cannons and physical force. After three days of being unable to permanently break the strike line, on November 16, 2005, the military started firing into the crowd. The striking workers who where living on the strike line where unarmed and had up to now been fighting the military back with nothing but human bodies and human spirit. The Hacienda Luicita Massaccre, as it is known here, ended with 20 dead and numerous wounded Hacienda Luicita residence. The footage is available on you tube and is used often in lectures about all sectoral issues in this country to show the how brutal the military repression is in the Philippines. (

&feature=related) After berrying their dead the strikers came back and set their strike line up again, keeping it in front of the sugar mill for over a year. The case has gone to the Supreme Court, which has put up a restraining order against the Cojuancos but allowed the farmers to start planting as they wait for the decision.

I moved first into a community with a well organized local farming collective and wonderfully friendly residence. My host family was headed by the Collective's General Secretary, a tall, quiet man who prized himself on helping the local farmers in everything from solving disputes to finding money for fertilizer. He took no payment for his work, because the farmers couldn't afford to pay him; instead being supported in his work by family members living overseas. In his yard I ate wild green mangoes and listened to people talk about this years seedling prices, the quality of the farming experts sent from the government and paying back their loans from the local bank. I learned about the communities concerns and worries.

On Wednesday morning I was given a tour of the Hacienda. Our first stop was a rice field. I stood on the edge of a dirt road in the clear warm Filipino sun and looked over my first rice field. The shallow, square plots where so thick with enthusiastic, green shoots that I couldn't even see the water pooled beneath. In the background an extinct volcano loomed benignly behind thin mist. I was in awe of how strange and foreign a place I was in. The whole morning felt otherworldly, until we return to my host family's yard and sat again with the farmers. Listening to men who looked like my grandfather, whose face had tanned as leathery as their's during full summer days working in the garden, and who talked like my father, with the practical tones of people whose families eat or starve depending on the land, I felt suddenly at home. I could easily have been in New Brunswick talking about mill closures, in Alberta talking about droughts and floods, or in PEI talking about potato blight. Southeast Asia no longer felt foreign, on the other side of the world no longer felt foreign. These people worried about the same things my neighbors about. I felt in this instant an innate understanding of these people and this place.... until the military showed up. It happens so often here that just as I start to feel comfortable here something happens to remind me of how different this situation is compared to Canada.

On Wednesday afternoon we found out that a group of military men had arrived that morning to ask the baranguy council if they could set up a camp in the baranguy hall. I was told that the baranguy captain was on the Cojuanco payroll. After long negotiations the Captain and the military leaders decided to set up a military camp in a house they would rent beside my host families house. The proximity to the community leader's home was no accident. Plans where made hurriedly to delegate different authority for the collective
to other members, for my host father to leave the community for a "vacation" to visit him family in another province and for me to be moved to another community. I was in no danger myself, but as a tall, red headed foreigner would draw a lot of unwanted questions about why I was there and why I was being hosted with this specific family. It is sad to say that my host father and the other members of his farming collective where now in danger. The military sets up bases within the communities to get information about the community leaders and to stop their work organizing the peasants through intimidation and violence. In the last two years one peasant union leader and one pro-farmer city councilor and one sympathetic local bishop have been killed mysteriously by masked men. It makes me so angry to see how much time, energy, violence and money the Cojuancos are putting into not giving the farmers their legal title to the land.

I was moved Thursday morning into the home of big farming family quite literally two towns over. My guide for my last three days told me that as an organizer he used to be afraid for his life. His house was actually hit by three bullets in a drive by shooting one night in 2005 while he was sleeping in the picket line. Now though, having been through so many years of struggle for control of the land in the Hacienda he says that he is no longer afraid of bullets, but is afraid of the Cojuanco money. All of the Baraguay officials in all of the 11 villages have been bribed by the Cojuancos. Every community has a small military base, a contingent of CAFGUs (local men who are given some military training and who are paid to do evening and weekend patrols for the military, as well as to be a constant presence of military in people's daily lives) and paid informers. The organizers are no longer able to hold meetings to talk about their activities within the union of farm workers. In fact admitting you are even a member of the union of farm workers is dangerous. The organizers now have to operate underground, going through the fields talking to people one at a time about the new issues arising in the struggle.

With cheeks suntanned as dark as cedar chips my guide works in his rice field, plays with his numerous grandchildren, eats mongo beans grown by his uncle and does not show his years of experience as a political organizer and community leader. But when you sit with him in a nippa hut he can tell you between puffs on his Fortune cigarettes all about the effort of the Cojuancos to manipulate people into planting sugar cane on their own land in order to get around the restraining order, or about how they bid for government infrastructure projects in order to put them in the Hacienda, making the land commercial and thus useless if it inevitable goes to the farmers. He can talk with authority on the use of psychological warfare against the local community people, and the need to prepare the people mentally for the possibility that there may need to be anther strike and that may mean more military violence. I sat in awe as a cool breeze whistled through the rushes above my head and goats bleat in the background. This man, and the other community organizers who also look like everyday peasants and laborers, are actually some of the most intelligent political strategists I have ever met. Sadly they have been forced to gain these skills in order to insure the literal survival of their families, their grandchildren and their great-grand children.

I am still finding it hard to understand the issue of land reform in this country. Land reform is by far one of the biggest issues within the people's movements. The annual mobilization on January 22 is one of the biggest national protests all year, commemorating a police lead massacre of farmers protesting in Manila in 1988 after they realized that CARP was not actually land reform. CARP is the piece of government legislation that was instated during the 1980s to take land away from the feudal landlords and to give it to the farming families that had been working on it for generations. The legislation was put in place by then President Cory Aquino (Cory Cojuanco of the Hacienda Luicita Cojuancos before marriage). The legislation was full of lop holes for landlords, so that they would not actually have to give any of the land to farmers. The protest this January 22 was sadly a demand for the same reform the farmers wanted in 1988. There is an attempt right now by a progressive Congressman to pass a new genuine piece of land reform legislation. The likelihood of it passing while the the Congress is full of landlords is slim. Sitting in the Hacienda I still don't really understand how land reform was or is now suppose to work. Coming from Canada's capitalist society it does not make sense to my mind for the land to be nationalized and given to farmers. The people I talk to seem to think that the land will be paid for in some way, but even most of the farmers are not aware of how it will work exactly. What they are certain of is that their families have been farming these lands for generations. Many of the families have not farmed rice or vegetables since the Hacienda was monopolized by sugarcane, and no longer remember how. But owning the land and farming the land means a chance to feed their families and make money for their families. Right now nothing else in the country but the land seems to provide that sort of a guarantee.

Sitting mid-afternoon on the edge of a rice field, watching misty mountains on the horizon, listening to the Tagalog conversations of farmers resting away from the heat, to the wind in the nippa and the ever present ducks I start to understand. I don't understand financially or academically how it will work. But I do understand that these people love the land and feel like they come from the land and want to again understand the land like their ancestors did. In this place I also love the land, and want to eat rice and eggplant I grew myself. Owning the land is about owning and controlling their own lives and their own politics, something the people of Hacienda Luisita have not done for a lone time.

---

Photos

Mongo Beans
The sugarcane grows unbidden amongst the other plants as if by memory.

Volcano on the Horizon
Seeing a volcano for the first time was amazing. This volcano went off last in the 90s I think. It ruined the American military base had ash falling as far as the Hacienda.

Rice Fields
Rice fields look an lot like wheat fields, until you see the line of banana trees at their edge.

Mangos
Wild sour green mangoes grow all over the Hacienda. So do star apples and pomellos. Trying all of the new kinds of fruit is one of the best parts of this trip.