Cory's Land Grab
Rosett, Claudia
Claudia Rosett CORY'S LAND GRAB Land reform will not save Philippine democracy. Manila T he ex-dictator is shacked up in 1 Hawaii. There's a new constitution, a newly elected congress, and the...
...Conference Participants Fausto Amador, along with his half brother, Carlos Fonseca, he founded the FSLN...
...government to help pay for the dismemberment of the Philippine farm sector—until recently one of the few areas in which the country's economy was growing...
...Local landowners were compensated with shares in large state companies...
...Manila businessmen are not optimistic that the situation will come unstuck anytime soon...
...Hutton and Company...
...policy that sugar plantation workers go hungry today in the allied, struggling democracy of the Philippines, while American consumers pay several times the world sugar price so that the American producers can go on basking in the shade of their government-enforced cartel...
...For one thing, their redistributions involved, in part, farms that had belonged to Japanese colonial landlords—who were in any event beating a retreat after losing World War II...
...This would entail getting rid of the high tariffs that still apply on hundreds of imports...
...One of the reform's architects, Philippine economist Mahar Mangahas, says simply that the economic result "doesn't matter...
...Barry Rubin, Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies...
...On the southern island of Mindanao, for example, some landowners have threatened to join forces with the Moslem separatists should the government try to seize their property...
...The country's estimated 5.3 million acres of private plantations would be next on the list...
...Aquino has already followed a rash of prescriptions for easing these troubles...
...They meet to reexamine the assumptions of the New Left and to consider how those assumptions have been inserted, with destructive results, into the national dialogue, and particularly in regard to the struggle against totalitarian forces in Central America...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987...
...And establishing who actually holds title to the properties scrambled up by the Marcos reform would straighten out a property market that's currently too confused to be remotely efficient...
...Mrs...
...Co-directed by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, best-selling authors and former editors of Ramparts...
...America's Representative Solarz wants the U.S...
...As of mid-September, no final program had emerged...
...Farmworkers who get their own land will find it hard to resell, because only those who own very little land to begin with will be allowed to buy...
...But the likely shape of the reform seemed clear...
...Last year, when her priorities were in better order, she pushed mainly for a more free market system...
...The usual experience, from Latin America to Africa to much of Asia, has been that land reform chews up property rights, scares away investors, and leaves a lot of landless farmworkers with nothing but squatters' rights to a lot of dirt...
...Michael Medved, film critic, bestselling author, and cohost of "Sneak Previews...
...T wenty years ago they condemned America's democracy as a sham and dismissed its enemies as figments of cold war paranoia...
...Like many of his fellow devotees, Prosterman likes to point to Taiwan and South Korea as examples of countries that made land reform work...
...This year, alas, she waffled her way into the land reform camp...
...Stephen Schwartz, founder, the Young Communist League, and former member of the revolutionary Fomento Obrero Revolutionario (FOR) in Spain...
...Bruce Cameron, former Legislative Director, Americans for Democratic Action...
...markets...
...Stephen Solarz, American professor Roy Prosterman, and Philippine left-wing politician Jaime Tadeo—seem to believe that somehow, this time, land reform might succeed...
...The Philippines is going to have a land reform...
...Michael Novak, Director, Social and Political Studies, American Enterprise Institute...
...uried in here are a few good ideas, 1...
...That plan got itself conveniently lost along the way, leaving a great many land titles in limbo...
...Furthermore, Taiwan and Korea are special cases, unlikely to inspire similar results in the Philippines...
...Here the president was particularly vulnerable, because her family owns a 15,000-acre sugar plantation, Hacienda Luisita, in central Luzon...
...WHEN: Friday through Sunday, October 16 – 18, 1987 WHERE: The Grand Hyatt Hotel 1000 H Street, N. W. Washington, D.C...
...The benefits of deregulation would be huge and lasting, both for the farmworkers and for the urban poor—who are about to be asked to subsidize the land reform...
...While land reform enthusiasts say that redistribution will soothe the restive peasants, almost no one expects that the rural poor will emerge from this exercise with a higher standard ofliving...
...But then, it isn't in the nature of land 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 reforms to get far...
...Nathan Glazer, Professor, Harvard University...
...That, after all, is the perfectly worthy object of this otherwise ridiculous land reform...
...To wit: Next year the leases on the U.S...
...Anyone with discretionary power to dish out farmland in bite-size pieces would face plenty of temptation to play favorites—for a price...
...But landowners now have no doubt that they are threatened...
...Selling off state lands is a fine policy...
...On the weekend of October 16-18, 1987 a group of former leftists, radicals and self-styled revolutionaries will meet in Washington at the Second Thoughts Conference to discuss the personal and political journeys that have taken them far from the way they were in the 1960s...
...The fear was that if Mrs...
...Today they recognize that America's enemies are real and that America's democracy must be defended...
...But the bulk of the land reform could end up like the seedier scenes of Gone with the Wind—with the peasants playing the role of the dirt...
...Scott McConnell, former anti-war activist, and a reporter for the radical Dispatch News Service...
...She left it to the new legislators to work out the details...
...markets—notably in sugar, but also for goods ranging from fruits to textiles to shoes...
...For some crops, economies of scale will be lost if the pro-posed 17-acre limit on property size becomes law...
...military facilities at Clark Air Field and Subic Bay in the Philippines come up for review, and in four years they're due to expire...
...N or does it seem to stop the more frenzied land reformers who come calling from abroad...
...This won't be the first Philippine land reform...
...The first target will be the country's roughly 1.4 million acres of privately held corn andrice farms, originally slated for redistribution under Marcos...
...to bomb buildings and murder policemen...
...These properties will be "sold" to the government under duress, at prices set by the government...
...In Taiwan, also, land reform doubled as a privatization program that helped revive the industrial economy...
...David Hawk, during the 1960s active in the National Student Association, Vietnam Moratorium Committee, and the Dump Johnson Movement...
...Any program that forces landowners into "selling" their farms amounts to expropriation...
...The Communist insurgents keep hauling in new recruits, and more than 24,000 guerrillas are now terrorizing the countryside and cruising into the cities Claudia Rosett is the editorial page editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal...
...The Philippine government proposes to spend $2.9 billion (or about 10 percent of annual GNP) over the next few years to fund the redistribution of at least several million acres of land...
...T o her credit, Mrs...
...The Philippines today gets only restricted access to a number of U.S...
...She has been lenient with the rebel soldiers involved in at least the first four coup attempts...
...Land reform won't ensure that...
...defense strategy in the Pacific, where a major Soviet naval buildup is now underway...
...Aquino needs to win over the countryside right now, there's at least one possibility that comes to mind...
...Free market reform would...
...The idea is to weed out a crop of problems that seems to grow more lush with every passing newscast...
...The farm sector accounts for about one-quarter of the Philippines' GNP...
...Former Foreign Editor of The Guardian...
...One well-informed Philippine state official, talking about the proposed redistribution, says: "We expect the number of unprofitable operations will triple...
...Jeff Herf, former leader in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), University of Wisconsin, Madison...
...The country owes more than $28 billion abroad, the bureaucrats are still reportedly raking in bribes, and the phone system works as if wired with Imelda's old shoelaces...
...Aquino seems to have had doubts about the virtues of farm redistribution...
...Moslem separatists threaten the southern islands...
...Once again, we get back to government clerks ladling out money, alongside the clerks who will be busy collecting the installment payments due the state...
...Almost no one seemed to consider that the president's reluctance might stem from sheer good sense—even though Mrs...
...Aquino's only son was wounded and more than fifty civilians were killed...
...These bases are crucial to U.S...
...Few of the new landowners would have capital enough for the necessary seed, fertilizer, and equipment...
...There's more...
...But if it's policy pyrotechnics Mrs...
...In one of the most recent cases, in El Salvador, some of the peasant "beneficiaries" ended up petitioning the government to bring back the original plantation owners...
...Former Chairman, Vietnam Moratorium of Connecticut...
...The change of heart began back in January when twelve land reform demonstrators were shot to death by government guards during a march on Malacaltang, the presidential palace...
...Even Marcos gave this gimmick a whirl, when he signed a decree in 1972 for redistribution of private corn and rice lands...
...Glenn Loury, PhD, author, political commentator, and professor, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University...
...Aquino has yet to carry through with such moves...
...Assuming—logic notwithstanding—that the land gets neatly sliced up and titles actually get doled out, there are further problems...
...While this was going on, the Kuomintang government—bankrupt and fearful of Communist China—was desperately taking a number of decisive measures to free up parts of the economy...
...Thanks to this enduring monopoly, Philippine farmers still pay some of the highest freight rates in Asia to ship their produce from outlying islands to the docks of Manila Bay...
...This amounts to a watered-down version of serfdom, since the only way for most farmers to leave for the big city will be if they simply abandon their land...
...That the whole idea of land reform is—presumably—to spare the Philippines from the fate of these unhappy countries does not seem to figure in Tadeo's plans...
...Tadeo, the left-wing politician who helped organize the January protest in which people got shot, raises the most disturbing specter of all...
...This summer a cabinet minister was gunned down in the street...
...ou don't have to work for Salo- 1 mon Brothers to see that there's a deal waiting to be made...
...While the congress haggles, investment decisions and rural development hang fire...
...On the brighter side, she has turned the Marcos cronies out of their old monopolies, and promised a freer economy, including privatization of many state-held companies—though this has been all too slow in coming...
...There's a new constitution, a newly elected congress, and the economy is growing for the first time in almost four years...
...For some reason, the current supporters of a new Philippine land reform—including US...
...Also, while land reform may be popular among left-wing politicians, it has raised nasty rumblings from those whose property would be stolen...
...Some have been ill-advised...
...Aquino's critics charged that she was putting her personal interests above her political obligations...
...Thus, in a grandslam bid to promote justice, end rural misery, head off Communist recruitment and so calm the restless Philippine army, the government now plans to delegate to some tens of thousands of bureaucrats the power to chop up the farms...
...Lloyd Billingsley, author...
...Aquino, or Representative Solarz for that matter, could propose that the Philippines offer new leases for Clark and Subic in exchange for completely free access to U.S...
...After that, land reform became the fashionable cause in Manila, billed by many as a crucial test of Mrs...
...It's one of the more embarrassing aspects of U.S...
...Arturo Cruz, Jr., former Washington representative of the Sandinista Party and Chief Advisor of the Sandinista Ministeries of Economic Planning and Foreign Affairs...
...Xavier Arguello, former General Secretary of the Sandinista Ministry of culture...
...Aquino's resolve...
...Then there's the problem of property rights...
...Aquino has been campaigning since she took office...
...Here, say Philippine government officials, the state will help out with easy credit...
...Aquino gave in and signed a decree requiring a broad-ranging land reform...
...Norman Podboretz, Editor, Commentary...
...In sugar, for example, America restricts its imports under a quota system, to keep up the high prices paid to domestic sugar producers...
...Since President Aquino took office in February 1986, there have been five military coup attempts—escalating from the bizarre occupation of the Manila Hotel last year to the violent attack this August in which Mrs...
...David Ifshin, Director of the Washington Capital Markets Office, E.F...
...All new landholdings would probably be limited by law to no more than about seventeen acres...
...It sounds a lot grander to promise a $2.9 billion program to help the poor than it does to tell them they are free to help themselves...
...Robert Leiken, author, scholar, and political commentator at the Center for International Affairs, Harvard...
...Marty Peretz, Editor-in-Chief, The New Republic...
...Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan "Farms Not Arms," Tadeo said in an interview in April that for land reform to work, "maybe we have to learn from Cuba, China, Nicaragua...
...For a country that's supposed to be trying to phase out the more medieval legacies of Marcos, that seems an odd way to treat the rural population...
...Samuel Leiken, former member of the Northern Student Movement (black counterpart to the SDS), and publisher of Freedom North...
...A prior land reform, promised by President Ramon Magsaysay in the 1950s, didn't get far either, because Magsaysay died in a plane crash...
...Even more to the point, Philippine farmworkers would be better off, and democracy would have a chance to put down some roots...
...Philippine GNP has been growing thanks to the breakup of the Marcos crony monopolies, but further deregulation will be needed to sustain the boom...
...Irving Kristol, Editor, The Public Interest...
...Aquino's brother, Jose "Peping" Conjuangco...
...Meanwhile, the U.S...
...Joshua Muravchik, former chairman, Young People's Socialist League...
...She offered first a cease-fire, then amnesty, to the Communists...
...William Phillips, Editor, Partisan Review...
...Richard Neuhaus, activist in the civil rights movement, and founding member of Clergy and Laity Concerned...
...What's kept the Philippines poor is not that one-fifth of the population owns about 80 percent ofthe privately held land, but that the government can't keep its hands off business...
...The next move would be to urge the Philippine congress to inflict the tamest land reform possible, so that the Philippines could produce something to sell...
...is engaging in similarly ungracious behavior...
...What he wants to do is "break up the power structure" in the countryside...
...A government official who has worked on the draft program agrees that productivity will go down, but at least "social justice will be served...
...Aquino kept saying she wanted a land reform program only if it would actually work...
...It would mean shutting down those branches of the bureaucracy that exist to collect tolls on trade—such as the section that levies a tax on the import of new technology...
...Ron Radosh, former Editor of Studies on the Left and Marxist Perspectives...
...What he tends to leave out is that these Even Marcos gave this gimmick a whirl, when he signed a decree in 1972 for redistribution of private corn and rice lands...
...Yet twenty-one months after President Marcos flew away, Philippine democracy has a bad case of the shakes...
...On July 22, just five days before the new congress convened, Mrs...
...American consumers would live better...
...Not least, the new Philippine constitution requires that farmworkers be allowed to enjoy the "just fruits" of their labors...
...So President Aquino's government is about to try one of the all-time quack-cures of development...
...The appropriate T-shirt slogan might be "Farms And Arms...
...Aileen Kraditor, former member of the Communist Party, U. S . A. Hilton Kramer, Editor, The New Criterion...
...O'Rourke, humorist, and Foreign Correspondent for Rolling Stone Magazine...
...And while a Taiwan-style swap of state company shares for private land has been proposed to help fund the Philippine land reform, privatization has been mired for the past year in more of the usual government wrangling...
...Free market measures carry a political disadvantage, of course...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 17 are just about the only two successes to be found in the whole, wide, redistributed Third World...
...20002 202/543-3515 Accommodations: Call the Grand Hyatt Hotel at 800/228-9000 or 202/582-1234...
...though they might not survive the main drawbacks of the reform...
...Aquino didn't act, the landowner-dominated congress would balk at land reform...
...The same process might then be repeated for about 6 million acres of land that is government-owned, abandoned, or has been seized from Marcos cronies...
...Experience in the Philippines suggests this is a temptation best kept to a minimum...
...Currently there's a debate in the Philippines over whether the leases should be renewed...
...It would mean breaking up the inter-island shipping monopoly, once held by cronies of Marcos, now held by cronies of Mrs...
...funding has also been urged by Prosterman, a veteran consultant of the Vietnam and El Salvador land reform fiascoes—and a man who continues to seek vindication for his love of the reforms that betrayed him...
...There's also the problem of how the bureaucracy would decide who gets what...
...But if land reform won't work, there's still no question that some kind of help is needed for the rural poor in the Philippines—who have indeed been brutalized by decades of government mismanagement, corruption, and monopolies...
...The idea involves a simple swap of privileges...
...Sponsored By The National Forum Foundation 214 Massachusetts Avenue, N.E., Suite 220 Washington, D.C...
...Clearly something more is needed...
...The plots will then be broken up and resold at state-subsidized prices, on long-term installment plans, to the tenant farmers and laborers who currently work the land...
...Land reform enthusiasts urged her to sign a sweeping decree before handing over her special law-making powers to the elected congress, due to convene on July 27...
...Doan Van Teal, former anti-war activist as Vice President of the Saigon Students Association...
...Active in the anti-war movement in Berkeley during the late 1960s...
...Manila's politicians seem to have forgotten not only the history of land reform, but the events of World War II...
...Member of the Independence Committee to End the War in Vietnam...
...Gross disregard of the rights of private ownership won't much help the Philippines attract the investor's capital it desperately needs—and for which Mrs...
...There's the immediate question of how much of the $2.9 billion in proposed funding would ever make it past the grimy interiors of the Department of Agrarian Reform and related bastions of decision-making in Manila...
...And the Communist New People's Army grows...
Vol. 20 • November 1987 • No. 11
