Email: karlomongaya@gmail.com

Affiliation: University of the Philippines Diliman

Nationality: Philippines

The Agrarian Question in the Philippines: Past and current imperatives

Abstract

This article is the first attempt to trace the evolution of the agrarian question in the Philippines and examine its present form. By revisiting previous scholarship, debates, and social movement histories, this work illustrates how leftwing movements in the Philippines articulated the agrarian question, a key subset within Marxist inquiry dealing with the processes of agrarian change and the place of the peasantry in these transformations.

Land and tenancy issues fueled numerous localized peasant-based revolts during the 300 years of Spanish colonial rule. The ilustrado reformists, who inspired the anti-colonial movement, framed the land question within broader struggles against colonial backwardness and clerical abuses. However, they prioritized the interests of the landed elites to maintain national unity against the colonizers. Class-based agrarian movements eventually emerged by the early 20th Century amidst the retreat of Filipino nationalist forces, the propagation of socialist literature, and growing reaction to peasant dispossession under American colonialism. These movements laid the foundation for articulating the land and peasant questions as part of an anti-feudal struggle that can be advanced through workers-peasant alliances, a framework concretized in the merger of the peasant-based Partido Sosyalista ng Pilipinas and the working-class Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) in 1938.

Despite the defeat of the PKP-led Huk rebellion in the 1950s, its articulation of the anti-feudal struggle — which zeroed in on feudal backwardness as the hindrance to attaining national development — became the guiding framework of Philippine leftwing movements until the 1980s. The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), founded in 1968, gave this basic approach a Maoist hue by emphasizing peasant-based armed struggle as the primary form of contention, following the strategy of encircling the cities from the countryside and relegating land distribution after revolutionary victory. The political and economic transformations that began to be evident in the 1980s triggered a rethinking of this framework. The period saw the unfolding of new tendencies — the subsuming of peasant issues to the labor question by worker-oriented movements, the pursuit of peasant autonomy, the commitment to winning concrete gains by maximizing the agrarian reform law, and a growing focus on the impacts of globalization on agriculture.

The country’s tightening entanglement with global capitalism, rapid urbanization, and diminishing agrarian population came side by side with the government’s agrarian reform program reaching its late phase. This post-agrarian reform period was marked by modest gains in land redistribution alongside the persistence of inequality, violence, and land reconcentration amidst loopholes and lack of support services for beneficiaries. Left-wing agrarian movements in the Philippines have been wracked by fragmentation and difficulties in mobilizing farmers saddled with more complex concerns. While these movements are in the process of regrouping and rethinking, efforts to revive agrarian struggles will have to link the continuing assertion of land rights with new challenges spawned by a declining agricultural sector, food insecurity, and climate crisis.

Bio

Sheila Mae B. Pagurayan is currently doing her M.A. in Anthropology at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Her MA thesis deals with repeasantization and changing urban-rural configuration in the Philippines. Prior to taking her MA, she worked with non-profit and community-based organizations engaged in women's and children's rights and humanitarian advocacies.

Karlo Mikhail I. Mongaya has written about the histories of the left-wing movements, the Global Sixties and the Cold War, and agrarian issues in the Philippines. His work on these topics has been featured in academic journals, including Philippine Studies: Historical & Ethnographic Viewpoints, Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, The Global Sixties, among others. He is an associate editor of the Agrarian South Research Bulletin. He is also an assistant professor at the University of the Philippines, Diliman.

Both authors serve as volunteers for the Kilusan Para sa Repormang Agraryo at Katarungang Panlipunan (Katarungan), a national movement of peasants in the Philippines.