STILL WITHOUT LAND

...Her youngest, a girl of two years and seven months, has sores all over her chest and arms and a distended belly, the first sure signs of severe malnutrition...

...Though the international sugar market has collapsed and the prices of other crops are always shaky, the dream persists of long rows of coconut trees paying the country's way out of its international indebtedness...

...The land consists of huge estates owned by rich Filipinos, multinational corporations, and political cronies of various presidents...

...Few farmers reach the point of acquiring title to land...

...Nor is there any explanation of where the financially pressed Aquino government will get the money to compensate landowners for property taken from them and redistributed to poor farmers...

...Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have instituted major land-reform programs, distributing large estates to former peasants and laborers...

...They succumb to severe—and often fatal—malnutrition...

...Just a few blocks from the modernistic hotels in Manila, hundreds of children scramble over rubbish piles in quest of salable refuse...

...In the rainy season, he explained, primitive sanitation systems are washed away and infectious disease spreads more rapidly...

...But the poorest and neediest who live in remote villages never see "Supersnack...

...Along it, men squat all day in the sun, as idle as the fields around them...

...In the Philippines, however, there has been no political will to apply that formula...

...The government announcement specified distribution of two types of land: former holdings of Marcos cronies, and mortgaged lands that have been foreclosed on by banks...

...In her first precious year in power, Cor-azon Aquino could have ordered a thoroughgoing redistribution of land without fear that powerful landlords would mutilate the reform...

...In fact, many great plantations are already owned by independent cultivators who work under contract for such multinationals as Dole, Del Monte, Guthrie, and Sumitomo...

...Surveying one ward in which every bed was occupied, he said, "It is not so bad now...

...At first, Corazon Aquino seemed willing to buck the landowners, including her own family, which owns a 6,000-hectare sugar estate called Hacienda Luisita in Luzon...

...Says Eduardo C. Tadem, a development specialist at the University of the Philippines, "If Aquino carries through on the sequestered and foreclosed lands, it could make a big impact...

...A large crowd of farmers belonging to a leftists peasants' alliance had been picketing the Ministry of Agrarian Reform, protesting its inaction and requesting an appointment with the president...

...Sometimes," says Estillo, "it is only 'mamo-rice.'" That means, says the interpreter, "imagination rice"—nothing at all...

...Philippine experts regard this as scarcely more than a symbolic beginning...

...Prodded, Aquino met with the farm leader, Jaime Tadeo, who had led the peasant delegation on the day of the killings, and then her advisers announced with much fanfare that a new land-reform program would be promulgated even before the Congress was elected...

...Aquino's aides insist the price will be "affordable," but no one knows what that means...

...Such attitudes, to which the government defers, have turned Negros into a welfare island...

...That assumption is being widely questioned now, and the argument has been made that the big farms could do as well if they were turned into farmer-owned cooperatives...

...The wards are crowded with children dying of diseases their malnourished bodies can't resist...

...The post of Minister of Agrarian Reform went to a well-meaning administrator who had no experience in the field and little political clout...

...He saw no reason to resist the planting of corn and other food crops, he said...

...And every president has ultimately ignored those promises or abandoned the programs...

...Merlita Estillo, the mother of six children, explains that her husband is no longer employed...

...We are used to it," he said...

...Their ranks have grown swiftly in the last two decades, partly because of population growth and partly because of the wholesale land-grabbing that characterized the Marcos era, when the landed rich were able to take over much land that had once been farmed by independent peasants...

...During her campaign against Marcos early last year, she listed as her first priority for social reform a plan that would provide greater productivity and an "equitable sharing of the benefits and ownership of land...

...The rich got richer and acquired even larger estates, leaving less for the small farmers...

...To escape from hunger, members of the landless underclass have been fleeing to the cities...

...The power to act may already have passed her by, and the one hopeful moment in which she could have changed history may have disappeared...

...Land reform in those cases has meant not confiscation and redistribution, but merely the breaking of contracts and the replacement of foreign-owned companies by co-op management...

...With very few exceptions, the planters have refused, insisting that sugar prices are bound to revive...

...In a country that could easily grow more than enough to give all its people a proper diet, two-thirds of the children are underweight...

...At the hospital, Dr...

...Then," he said, "we will have three lying in each bed...

...These efforts have produced ample food supplies and a solid economic base that has helped support industrialization...

...This is the dry season...

...A tiny number of landlords have assigned their former workers small food plots for subsistence, but most cling to their estates and their memories of good old days...

...It is estimated that 35 per cent of Manila's families are illegal squatters...

...The child's diet, the mother tells me, consists of rice for breakfast, rice and perhaps a vegetable for lunch, rice and salt for dinner...

...As the demonstrators marched peacefully to the gates of Malacanang Palace, Marine guards fired upon them and killed at least nineteen...

...Sugar is easy, too—you just plant it and then go off to Manila or Europe...

...Today, more than 250,000 cane-cutters and mill hands are unemployed, reducing about a million people to total poverty...

...No longer...

...The government expects the future farmer-owners to come up with part of the compensation for landlords...

...Jaime Cardinal Sin, the archbishop of Manila, said the government's failure to carry out land reform was "in large measure" responsible for the killings...

...Benito Bionat recently told a visitor that thirty to forty children die there each month, most of blood poisoning or pneumonia...

...Infant mortality rates are almost the highest in Asia...

...Finance Minister Jaime V. Ongpin has said that the basic program outlined so far might require almost $2 billion...

...She does washing to pay for her family's food...

...The village street is a muddy, rutted thoroughfare lined with tumbledown packing-crate sheds...

...In the good times, a cane-cutter could expect to earn $1.50 a day...

...The land problem is the problem of the Philippines, and Aquino's instinct is not to deal with it at all...

...On January 22 of this year, a tragic encounter riveted the country's attention on land reform and forced Aquino to appear to act...

...She hinted, too, that she might use Hacienda Luisita as a model for the rest of the country to follow...

...There are no reliable figures on the amount of land available in the second category, the property foreclosed by banks, but it is not likely to be enough to make a difference...

...Still Without Land For Filipino peasants, Aquino brings no change BY WILLIAM CHAPMAN In her first year in office, President Cor-azon Aquino has repeated a pattern that is all too familiar in Philippine politics: Since the islands attained their independence after World War II, every president has promised to institute bold and imaginative programs of land reform to end the centuries-old curse that makes, serfs of the country's farmers...

...About two million tenant-farmers cultivate small plots of rice and corn and root crops, paying half or more of their yield to the landlords as rent...

...The luckiest of them end up in the Montelibano Memorial Hospital in Bacolod, which has become a showcase of sorts...

...On a farm near Kabankalan, a "progressive" planter who has encouraged modest concessions to the landless talked to me one day about his intransigent colleagues...

...Even Aquino's most conservative supporters were outraged...

...But landowners would never agree, he added, because it was sugar that made them "planters" rather than mere "farmers...

...Aquino is a courageous and inspiring personality, and she has more talent for political leadership than she is often credited with...

...The planters of Negros are a determined lot and have resisted even modest suggestions that they set aside small plots of unused sugar land for food crops...

...After her triumph over Ferdinand Marcos in February 1986, however, Aquino remained silent for almost a year on the subject of land reform...

...They are under intense pressure from the National Federation of Sugar Workers and the communist New People's Army to surrender some land for the production of corn and sweet potatoes...

...Though far-reaching land-distribution plans were put forward by President Magsaysay in the 1950s, President Ma-capagal in the 1960s, and President Marcos in the 1970s, none was carried out...

...The Philippines' status as the basket-case of Asia stands in wretched contrast to the success achieved by many other nations of the region in addressing the problem of rural poverty...

...We are fatalists...

...Perhaps we are not realistic...

...Magnificent plans have been promised three times in three decades and then left to die, and some believe the latest battle has already been lost...

...Finally, the government has shown no inclination to tackle the major part of the land problem—the huge estates controlled by Filipino landlords and multinational corporations which grow the bulk of the country's export crops...

...Moreover, Jovito Sa-longa, who heads the governmental commission that sequestered the lands, notes that most of them are tied up in litigation and unavailable for distribution...

...In the provincial capital of Bacolod and many outlying population centers, what stands between children and near-starvation is a nourishing gruel called "Supersnack," which is ladled out to thousands of children who line up at feeding stations every morning...

...He has hinted that a consortium of foreign lenders and international institutions might be tapped, but again there are no details...

...To buy seed and fertilizer, they go deep into debt to banks and money-lenders charging annual interest rates of up to 50 per cent...

...Malnutrition is widespread and acute...

...Since Philippine welfare is negligible, private charities, including the Catholic Church and UNICEF, have struggled to fill the gap...

...When asked what was happening on land reform, Aquino's advisers first said it would have to await adoption of a new constitution and then suggested that the new'Congress to be elected in May would have to attend to the matter...

...Most of these lands have neither been sequestered by the government nor foreclosed by banks, so they are not covered by the guidelines...

...But she is not a social reformer...

...As Jeremias Montemayor, president of the Federation of Free Farmers, recently put it, "The owner is not the tiller and the tiller is not the owner...

...duced a society not unlike America's Old South...

...According to one recent academic study, the totally landless now number five million and may account for a third of the Philippine population...

...In the early 1980s, world sugar prices collapsed and a gone-with-the-wind crisis descended on Negros...

...Above all," she said, the plan would be suited to the "needs of the small farmers, landless workers, and communities of tribal Filipinos whose lives and whose personal dignity depend on their just share in the abundance of the land...

...It would show that she is sincere, although the amount of land is small...

...The sights are painfully stark: huge expanses of fertile but unused fields bordered by the shacks of jobless families who survive on food handouts and root crops...

...The Philippines' land problem in all of its frightening aspects is clearly visible on the island of Negros in the Visayans, saddled with selfish absentee landlords, governmental neglect, and the disastrous consequences of a farm economy based on exportable plantation crops...

...Planters lived in ease and splendor while sugar workers earned a few cents per day...

...The Philippine economy is in ruins and the debt to foreign governments and banks amounts to $28 billion...

...One such place is the village of Mal-lorca on the edge of the large Victorias Milling Station in Negros Occidental...

...Tadem estimates, for example, that the land sequestered from Marcos's friends amounts to only about 100,000 hectares (out of total agricultural lands of some nine million hectares...

...There is no lack of practical ideas for land reform in the Philippines—just a lack of political commitment to carry them out...

...Whatever its symbolic significance, the land-reform program announced so far is timid in scope and marked with many uncertainties...

...He insisted on withholding his name, lest the planters' association ostracize him...

...There is an assumption, too, that the successful management of export crops requires the kind of centralized direction that only a large corporation can provide...

...in fact, Negros should abandon sugar entirely...

...that's the core of the agrarian problem...

...Statistics suggest that as many as 70 per cent of rural Filipinos exist on incomes that are below even that country's poverty line, earning less than $120 a month...

...These mechanized farms where sugar, coconuts, bananas, and pineapples are produced seem to enjoy a special protective status whenever Philippine governments talk of land reform...

...It is so easy...

...Landlords who controlled the political and administrative machinery were able to stifle every significant reform...

...But even that marginal livelihood is not available to most of the rural poor—the totally landless who take jobs on large plantations at outrageously low wages or drift from one odd job in the countryside to another...

...Manindigan, an alliance of businessman and Catholic educators who are among Aquino's ardent backers, charged that "the Aquino government has almost nothing to show for agrarian reform...

...The estates are worked by laborers and tenant farmers who lead a life of bare subsistence...

...Parents arrive daily from remote villages, holding their underweight children in their arms...

...In the past, they have been expected to earn the large amounts of foreign exchange that will be needed to launch a new era of industrialization, and the Aquino government seems to share that expectation...

...Sugar was king here for more than a century, and it proWilliam Chapman, former Tokyo bureau chief for The Washington Post, is the author of "Inside the Philippine Revolution," to be published this summer by W. W. Norton...