Land reforms can be utilized in different ways and it can have different meanings depending about how a person needs to use it. Some have described it with such broadness that there surely is the inclusion of all policies relating to the introduction of the current economic climate of the agricultural sector. The US described land reform as an contained program of actions developed to eliminate hindrances to the development of the current economic climate and society. This is of land reform may also be narrowed dow and once it is narrowed down. It can be used as provision of land to the landless (Warriner, 1969: xiv).
In this research newspaper, land reform which can be called as "agrarian reform" entails many things such as making changes in the restrictions and laws regarding the possession of land. The word may refer to public programs created by the government. These programs seek to reorganize land human relationships with the goal of more equal distribution of income and riches resulting to a greater productivity in the agricultural sector. There also ought to be the element of equity present alongside the increasing agricultural efficiency.
Why are land reforms important?
Land reform can be an important issue since almost all of the countries situated in the spot of Asia consider land reform as an important element involving the development of their national policies and laws and regulations. There is also the fact that countries situated in the Asian region have a great dependence on the effective implementation of programs of land reform in their own countries to allow them to have an effective market in the agricultural section. We must also remember that lots of of the programs including land reform in Asian countries never have been successfully implemented.
Land reforms still have a major part in the development of most countries in the Asia region. For some people, land reforms can be seen as one of the requirements to smoothen the progress of development and the regeneration of inactive or stagnant economies in Asia. There are a great number of peasants who must be provided of relief from the exploitive and unequal character of land ownership. These poor peasants have to be provided of even a piece of land to work on to allow them to be able to produce more earnings.
To some other people, reasonable and reasonable distribution of land can be considered as a sign of better equality and dignity to every man. They view land reforms as one of the basic needs for the attainment of politics democracy. To these folks, the most important underlying basic principle behind land reforms is that of dignity, flexibility, and humanity directed at the indegent peasants who get land.
Land reform is of vital importance because agriculture is the greatest economical sector in the most countries in the continent of Asia. Individuals in the rural locations in these countries will be the ones who are in great need of equitable land circulation. Thus, whatever reason people have, whether they see land reforms important for their concerns about equality or productivity, land reform has already become critical for the development of Parts of asia.
Land Reform in the Philippines
In the Philippine economy, agriculture certainly is still the most significant sector. Close to three quarters of the countrywide people are in the rural areas plus more than sixty-three percent of the Filipino individuals almost completely rely upon agriculture as their way to obtain living. Despite of the, the agriculture in the Philippines is filled up with lots of issues including land reform. The agricultural sector in the Philippines has mainly just provided for the development of forex requirements. This resulted to the country ending up brief for the ever growing home food demand. Food shortages, growing food prices, and dependence on food importations have grown to be one common situation in the united states since the post-independence period.
It is quite observable rendering it very evident that the absence of unyielding commitment to reform under a central authority will not result to a successful implementation of land reform. This gives us the final outcome that the politics will and the ability of political authority to take risks in disturbing the power balance in the contemporary society is one of the tips for the successful execution of land reform programs. Furthermore, the administrative body for reform should possess sufficient authority and power to prevent the influence of personal political hobbies in destroying the land reform programs. The supervision of our country, the Philippines, is assumed to own this necessary authority and electricity. But there are still lots of social pushes that effect the central supervision that oppose the land reforms here.
The other side of the storyline is sometimes the peasants have the power. They are able to align themselves with the central electricity plus they themselves implement regulations for his or her own benefit. This situation is true in a few countries in Asia.
But I think the situation here in the Philippines is the contrary of the prior statements in the previous paragraph. The peasantry in our country is actually weak. It generally does not have people organizations useful enough to express the views of the folks. The peasantry within our country lacks the durability to fight because of its rights when confronted with the landlords' economic and political advantages.
Peasant mobilization is an essential condition not limited to the redistribution of protection under the law in land, but also for a change in the politics status and awareness of the folks. Effective political company and mobilization of the rural poor peasants help them protect their interests affecting land reform.
It is not the case that the abused peasants do not fight for their rights. It really is the contrary. They fight for his or her rights and they have been spending so much time to attain these protection under the law. But the problem is they are still too weak to fight against their landlords or should I say the landlords are still too strong for them and these landlords haven't any plans showing a little bit of mercy to these poor peasants.
The issue of implementation is still present in these land reform programs. There's a greater opportunity for the implementation of the land reform to be successful if you will see more public participation. This can be achieved if there will be an equal attention given to land reform by all politics market leaders whether these market leaders are of local or nationwide level.
The way the land reforms are applied is determined by the effectiveness of rural organizations and corporations. For instance, if the neighborhood elite are completely control of land reforms, then your social pushes with the purpose of bringing about change in the rural scene will be greatly resisted.
The success of the land reform program is not only based on the strategies of its implementation. The country's success in this program will also hinge upon the characteristics of the administrative system and the neighborhood institutions of government or those of the peasantry that may have been made accountable for the execution of this program.
Our bureaucracy should have got the performance, efficiency and commitment for a successful land reform. We can see that people that originated from families with the background of land owners and are appointed to serve the public in the government will only decelerate the progression of land reform. I believe we can conclude that is true. It is greatly projected in our country that having leaders that came from the groups of land owners will just prevent the land reform. Even our current chief executive himself, Chief executive NoyNoy Aquino, has been evading the issues involving land reform since he started his term in the government last year.
Also, the composition of the bureaucracy performs a component for the progression of land reform. The norms and procedures in the bureaucracy should be changed to the changes the reform will result in. Inside our country, the purpose of the land reform should be for the advantage of the underprivileged peasantry. With this thought, the guidelines for expropriation, rules for evaluation and rules for payment should possess convenience and straight forwardness. This is needed in order for the decision designers to do something quickly and with certainty.
If the rules proposed tasks vagueness then this is only going to lead to several interpretations of the rules. These several interpretations will result to needless administrative and judicial squabbling which may annihilate the purposes of the reform.
The maintenance of the land and earnings records should also be well monitored because if people will not be able to have access on these information when the problem calls in for these details, then there will be difficulty in the implementation of the land reform laws.
Land reform in the Philippines has been an unfinished issue for a very long time. Philippine land reform insurance plan has progressed over time, becoming more processed on the matter of goals and implementing techniques. Specific improvements include the increasing focus on the idea of land redistribution; reduced landlord retention limitations, more specific provisions for implementation, and shortened schedules towards full tenant-ownership.
A brief record of the land reform in the Philippines:
Before the Spaniards came to colonize our country, land was the main source of riches of our ancestors. The customers of every barangay cultivated the land either as a community or simply individually. The ownership of land was actually distributed by the users of the barangay. This custom transformed when the Spaniards emerged and our country was colonized by them. The Spaniards unveiled a new notion involving the possession of land. This is the beginning of private ownership of land. But this new syndication of land had not been really for the benefit of the first Filipinos. The Spaniards redistributed the land among themselves. They redistributed the land one of the military officials and Spanish friars. This resulted in the establishment of the encomienda and the hacienda systems in the annals of the Philippines.
American Colonial Period (1898 - 1946)
After the Spaniards handed over the Philippines to new colonizers which will be the Us citizens, the American colonial administration started the attempts on land reform. The government did try to redistribute the lands nonetheless they however failed. Their efforts to redistribute the lands just led to them having the ability to minimize the size of land an individual can own. Also, some laws which were created by the American colonial authorities just provided American investors the opportunity to become big style landowners inside our country. Again, just like what happened through the Spanish colonization, the colonizers were the ones who benefitted from the land reform the colonizers also made for our country and in exchange the Filipinos were people to have problems with this inequality. The Filipino elites which were called the illustrados back then received high privileges. The North american colonizers sought for their assistance on jogging the government during this time period. This resulted to the maintenance of the elites' power. The unfair land redistribution offered delivery to more disputes over land ownership plus more peasant uprisings.
The Post-Independence Period Before Martial Legislations (1946 - 1972)
The peasant movements temporarily disappeared before the invasion of japan. The Philippine peasant activity flared into another open rebellion in 1948. The new republic of the Philippines was then confronted to solve the peasant rebellion and the federal government thought of resolving it by the means of the use of the armed service. During this time period, Chief executive Ramon Magsaysay sustained with the use of the traditional agrarian reform within his intend to counter the peasant uprisings. In this era also, the Land Reform Act of 1955 was formulated. It is regarded as a "breakthrough" for the concept of "nationwide compulsory redistribution of private land. " This new work gave birth to a Land Tenure Supervision directly under the Office of the Chief executive. It provided for the new ownership of landed estates for redistribution by negotiated purchase or by the removing of estates more than 3 hundred hectares of neighboring areas if owned or operated by individuals or 1000 hectares if owned or operated by companies.
But we should also take note of the actual fact that the expropriation proceedings cannot be initiated if there are no existing petitions for this from the majority of the tenants. At this period the landlords who owned or operated small scaled properties had taken the possibility to sell their land to the government in exchange of a good price. In expropriation, the landlords receives a commission in cash by the federal government. Though additionally it is notable that the money in which they are simply paid were very high since they have the market value of land as a basis for their price setting. This program was soon proven to be economically out of reach for the indegent peasants. Considering that they had to make a ten percent deposit on their story and they also still possessed to continue paying their hire to the landowners.
The successful component of President Magsaysay's rural development programs was the resettlement program. It really is considered as part of land reform dialling for the distribution of family-size farms through the starting of the general public agricultural lands. Resettlement programs started in the Philippines with the advantages of the American homestead programs. They were sustained with the establishment of the Country wide Land Resettlement Supervision (NLSA) in 1939/ NLSA was then changed by the Land Settlement and Development Power (LASEDECO) in 1950. Fundamentally, the program was designed to diffuse unrest by detatching tenants from densely filled regions including the Central Luzon.
Agricultural Land Reform Code of 1963
Under Chief executive Diosdado Macapagal, the Agricultural Land Reform Code of 1963 was created. It was thought to tolerate the unmistakable imprint of several young economists and intellectuals who were primarily concerned with the inability of existing agricultural development programs to create sufficiently rapid profits in productivity to complement the rapid people growth.
The greater emphasis on enhancing productivity clarifies the emergence of any incorporated approach to rural development which is a basically sensible concept which in cases like this meant the implementation of land reform as a basic element in a package deal of reforms including credit, expansion and other services to the agricultural sector. Land reform was targeted at the establishment of owner-cultivator dispatch and the financial family size farm as the foundation of the Philippine agriculture. The Chief executive sought for the entire abolishment of the talk about tenancy system. (Halim, 2006).
Martial Laws Period
The prior land reform programs just looked after the land monopoly by landlords. This resulted to poverty and misery in the countryside and this poverty and misery in the united states was very hard to describe. The poverty it created didn't only cause peasant unrest in the provinces but also brought about massive political protests and instability in the cities in the late 1960s and 1970s. Before Chief executive Ferdinand Marcos announced Martial Laws, he enacted the Code of Agrarian Reform (RA 6389) and the Agrarian Reform Special Profile Finance (RA 6390) in 1971 which lead to the creation of the Team of Agrarian Reform (DAR) and the Agrarian Reform Special Bank account Fund to accelerate the execution of government's agrarian reform program.
Under the Martial Law period, President Ferdinand Marcos proclaimed the entire country of the Philippines as a land reform area. Right after that the Presidential Decree No. 27 was released. This decree mandated the emancipation of tenants from their bondage and transferring them the ownership of the land they till. P. D. No. 27 placed tenanted rice and corn lands under the opportunity of advantage reform. Moreover, Marcos like his predecessors thought that an ambitious and promising agrarian reform program could weaken the communist uprising in the country.
CARP
The Philippines as a land looks back again at a long history of have difficulties for the land asset reform seen as a a progressive advancement towards what is now known as the In depth Agrarian Reform Program (CARP). The history of the land asset reform in the Philippines reflect the gradual progression of contemporary society and the government's popularity of the tillers' right in the land at the high cost of much bloodshed and a long drawn period of peasant insurgency. CARP have been the consequence of a consultative and legislative process that tried out to minimize social and class issues. Hence, it is more harmless and less agonizing for landowners, with attempts to pay them to some degree of satisfaction. The so called People Ability government of Leader Corazon Aquino embarked on another agrarian reform program which is CARP. It supposedly addresses the wide-spread landlessness and chronic poverty in the Philippine countryside.
During the implementation of CARP, many people from the land owning families contended a detailed agrarian reform program would be communistic, unconstitutional, and anti-developmental. Many insisted that agrarian reform should be limited by the syndication of general public lands and the delivery of support services, and that private lands be remaining untouched.
The farmers on the other hands saw the pending agrarian reform legislative options in Congress at that time as the avenue attaining their age-old dreams of getting the lands they tilled, and with identical vigor, clamored for an even more radical agrarian reform program. Their initiatives were a follow through of the cause for a comprehensive agrarian reform program that tragically resulted in what we know as the Mendiola Massacre in January 1987.
CARP provided out positive and negative results. There were changes in tenurial relations. There was a great upsurge in owner-cultivator ship and there were significant declines in show tenancy, lease keeping, and occurrence of owner non-cultivators between 1989 and 1999. These are constant with the land-to-the-tiller emphasis reform program and goals. CARP also resulted to raised perception of financial and sociable conditions and much more optimism. The increased security in land tenure and clearer property privileges provide strong subjective and mental health improvement in one's perception of life. This subconscious and emotional feeling may be a significant factor that has been underestimated by the greater economistic approach to agrarian reform and rural development.
CARP also lead to the release of higher value-added crops. Many family cultivated farms benefited with the agreement growing arrangements with large corporate clients of high value-added plants. CARP contributed to the reduction of social conflicts and increased serenity and order in particular areas. Agrarian reform is definitely from the reduction of peasant unrest and reducing revolutionary pressures from the countryside. They are of course much more likely in areas where agrarian reform has been applied successfully without strong landlords' amount of resistance and delays.
However why don't we not forget the fact that that many landlords showed resistance to CARP. The landlords' resistance and lack of cooperation in agrarian reform operations, including not delivering the necessary documents, legitimately combating the operations, using connections in the top hierarchy of federal, and wanting to circumvent regulations made it difficult to process land valuation. This stalled the acquisition of secure land privileges for most potential beneficiaries.
Many farmers complained of a change from unequal landlord-tenant relationships to unequal trader-farmer relationships. The unequal aspects of the latter's relationship is the farmers' insufficient usage of credit, input market segments, output markets, transportation, post harvest and storage facilities, which investors usually have. This resulted to the farmers maintaining sell their products to the professionals at less than market prices and incur interlinked credit-output-input market associations with them.
The device to partially reduce this marketing-credit problem of the farmer cultivator is usually the advertising of farmers' cooperatives which start out usually as credit cooperatives but with possibilities to branch out into marketing and producing cooperatives for the outcome and input market segments. Repayment problems come up because of the insufficient income of farmers and a general attitude that government cash need not be repaid since it is the government's role to help the people.
Other problems entail having less capital, the living of pests and diseases, and lack of access to facilities including safe-keeping, processing, travelling, irrigation, and roads. Many of these lie within the construction of support services and beneficiaries development, which the fiscal research shows is finding a lower-than-targeted talk about of funding up to now, especially lately. But there is also an aspect of the problems that lay in the macro, local, and local degrees of agricultural procedures, credit regulations, and infrastructure programs by the countrywide and local government authorities with corresponding functions for the Country wide Economic Development Expert (NEDA), Team of Agriculture (DA), Country wide Irrigation Power (NIA), Land Loan company of the Philippines (LBP), Office of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), and Department of Community Works and Highways (DPWH).
In basic, CARP generated positive impact in rural areas at the household level. There have been significant positive changes in the broader communal qualitative signs of welfare. The peace and order situation in the countryside possessed improved significantly. The number of respondents that identified a noticable difference in their over-all socio-economic well-being as well noticed a brighter perspective of the future increased. There have been no significant changes in the quantitative indicators like circulation of landholdings and income. Income is not a very good indication to examine the impact of CARP due to the fact there were only two data factors considered between your ten-year times from 1990 to 2000. Other qualitative indicators should be investigated, like value of possessions. For land distribution, while a significant proportion of the total scope of the program had already been sent out, these areas were not critical. Based on official information, private agricultural lands were hardly touched. Hench, the challenge of inequality was not addressed.
Despite various agrarian reform and land circulation programs of the nationwide administration, landlessness among Filipino farmers remains the most important problem of the mainly agricultural and backward Philippine market.
Land Reform in other Asian Countries
Now that I've pointed out the points worth focusing on relating to the land reform in the Philippines, it is currently time to look at the land reforms far away, specifically other countries in Asia. I have already said in the first part of the paper that the agricultural sector is the most dominant sector in most economies in the continent of Asia. This implies that agriculture is a really significant matter to most countries in Asia.
I can say that land reform is one of the undying issues inside our country the Philippines but this is also true in one of our neighboring countries that is the one and only Vietnam. The issue of land reform has been a dominant issue because of this Asian country for a long time. The Vietnamese battled to attain their freedom from the country of France. This left the people to realize the great need for a more fair syndication of land ownership as well as an alleviation of injustice inherent in prevailing land letting routines. The non-communist federal government in South Vietnam acquired found land reform as an essential subject for the united states and experienced exerted great work to go after a good land reform. It is the complete opposite for the communist government authorities. The land redistribution under these government authorities had been proclaimed by anarchy. The Communists utilize land reform as a way to political electricity and wish to eliminate not only landlordism but also all private property with collectivized agriculture as a finish result.
The non-communist federal wants to work with effectively all the bonuses of private venture in agriculture and has the situation of increasing landlord-tenant romantic relationships as well as the challenge of extending ownership to greater amounts of landless farmers. The non-communist federal government wished to maintain something in which both the landlord and the tenants are crucial to achieving a highly successful and modernized agricultural sector. An additional difference between your non-communist and communist objectives is that the non-communist administration requires expropriation and redistribution to be completed with due regard for land recognition, documents, and legal strategies.
The Communist federal government follows no clear group of rules. The basic method is simply to confiscate property regardless of proper identification, files, and exchanges of ownership and assign land for the intended purpose of increasing politics control alternatively than offering formal reputation of possession. The Communist market leaders' land reform created a division of classes where in those landowners who experienced supported the Amount of resistance and has previously been accepted were liquidated. A rise in the number of landlords also occurred.
In the development of land reform in Vietnam, their National Liberation Front side (NLF) or better known as the "Viet Cong" also possessed a part in land reform. The top of the goals of the Viet Cong's land reform is to create a Communist society predicated on a dictatorship of the proletariat. The terminal works of the Communist land reform are the collectivization of land and the final reduction of private possession as a public incentive.
The present Constitution of Vietnam advocates certain targets such as making folks property owners, providing special support to those elements of population which have the standard of living and raising the typical of living of rural residents and especially assisting farmers to have their own farmland.
Considering the points stated above relating to the land reform in Vietnam, I feel that the execution of land reform is more successful in South Vietnam where in the non-communist leaders' advocated equity. The Communist market leaders were more focused on political control and this just resulted in the farmers rebelling against their unfair conditions in their land reform. Assessing the situation in the Philippines to Vietnam, I can say that colonialism afflicted both countries negatively.
To lengthen the talk on land reforms in Asia, I decided to choose a far more of an industrial country instead of an agricultural one and I've thought of Japan. The country of Japan experienced greatly after the long years of war in the past. The people suffered with food shortages and the current economic climate really was down. This is when the federal government thought that land reform was necessary to avoid the tenant farmers who have been disoriented with the oppressive tenancy system from building a hotbed of radicalism. The first land reform was then created which resulted to a fatality. The right of compulsory copy had not been to be exercised unless a tenant farmer mentioned his determination or desire to acquire land. In outcome of the, there existed the risk that landlords unwilling to part with their land would put pressure on their tenants to give up the rights to the land, and not just would sham owner-farmer institutions be created, but land would be secretly moved at preposterous prices. The second land reform had taken a step forward in the establishing of cultivation protection under the law. It had been made illegal for a landlord to cancel or won't renew a lease on farm land without the agreement of the prefectural governor. In 1950, the establishment of the owner-farmer system had been completed.
After the land reform, the possession of land in Japan has been generally stabilized. Most farmers have become owner-farmers. Possession of farm has become almost synonymous with management, and then for the very first time in this country's record, peasants have become proprietors.
Now assessing the situations that occurred in the Philippines, Vietnam and Japan, I can conclude that the theory that the farmers who are the cultivators of the land also needs to be the owners of the land they cultivate exists in all the land reforms in these three different countries. This showed fairness and equity. But I can also say that even though that there surely is the fact that concept is present in the targets in the land reforms in these countries, it is not true or rather it isn't achieved in the execution of the land reforms in every countries.
Japan may have been successful on its implementation considering how their authorities managed to efficiently create the owner-farmer system. And through observation, I assume anyone can say that Japan has really prospered through the years not only in the commercial sector but also in the agricultural sector since they are in a position to develop new technology for cultivating their plantation lands in a more efficient way.
