PAN Asia Pacific’s No Land, No Life! Campaign, together with the Asian Peasant Coalition (APC), has launched the Peasants Rise Up broadcast series. The series, hosted by Bobby Ramakant of Citizen News Service and Christina Sayson, tackles landlessness, corporate control of agriculture, human rights, and other issues currently faced by the peasantry across Asia. The Peasant Rise Up series is part of the Global People’s Summit for a Just, Equitable, Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems. It celebrates the success stories of the peasant movement and highlights the call for land to the tillers as necessary for a truly radical food systems transformation.
The Philippine agriculture is facing a severe crisis with the implementation of the Rice Liberalization Law (RA 11203). After more than a year of implementation, it has already marked its devastating effects on Filipino farmers. Due to the influx of imported rice coming from different neighbouring countries, which is also mandated and directed by WTO, local producers were forced to lower the prices of their rice to as low as Php7. This diminishing price has led to serious dangers to the lives of our farmers.
Last November 2019, the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) Philippine Rice Research Institute released a policy paper explaining that the total income losses of rice farmers nationwide due to the RLL ranged from P61.77 billion to P129.54 billion. Meanwhile, the Federation of Free Farmers also said last December 2019 that losses can actually reach P140 billion.
Central Luzon, the country's rice granary suffers the brunt of the Rice Liberalization Law and at the same time, its mountains and plains are also being targeted for massive conversion.
Several hundred thousand hectares of farmland are in danger of being converted for projects such as the the 9,450-hectare Clark Green City, the Bulacan Aerotropolis, the Pampanga Megalopolis, and the 36,000-hectare Balog-Balog Megadam and the 20,000-hectare Aboitiz Geothermal Powerplant among others. With these, Central Luzon has now become the land conversion hotspot for the Duterte government's Build! Build! Build! program.
Join us in knowing more about the plight of farmers in Central Luzon and how they continue to struggle for genuine agrarian reform under the tyranical rule of the Duterte regime.
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