Have you ever been to the Starbucks at Hacienda Luisita, San Miguel, Tarlac? No, neither have I, but according to its Facebook page, a little less than 800 people have stated being there at some point in their lives. I for one do not see why any sudden influx of people would come rushing to that particular Starbucks, but apparently they do.
So forgive me and correct my limited Manileño perspective, as I’ve always thought that Hacienda Luisita was a place populated predominantly by people of the Land: those who have been tilling the soil for close to two generations, generally without sufficient capital technology, and whose incomes amount to but grains of minimum wage, if any.
As such, community buildings should serve community needs. I don’t see the locals stopping by to discuss the Tarlac city market’s sugar pricing scheme over cups of espresso worth a week’s score of rations for the family.
After all, this is not pre-recession Italy we’re talking about: this is Hacienda Luisita, black-listed by the Left as the symbol of our country’s unshakable feudalist oligarchy and the perpetration of social injustice by those in power, its hacenderos.
Filipino farmers do not drink Starbucks. Starbucks drinks Filipino farmers, and pays their distributors. Their distributors pay the landowners, and these lords drink, period. And not at the kanto, too. They like it subzero at the Manila Pen.
Which brings us to social inequity, and agrarian reform, which is a dead horse, even if DAR exists. But not so dead.
Tackling Philippine agrarian reform is tackling one of the most hopelessly wound public policy issues in Philippine society. Depending on the strength of administrative political will that supports the intention, balancing the negotiations of landowners and farmer unions has been moving at decimal growth, if at all quantifiable. Because of this, and having lost numerous lives from protests on their side, the union underdogs contemplate bitterness.
But when the Supreme Court (SC) ruled that the stock distribution option (SDO) for Luisita’s farm worker beneficiaries (FWB) be voided and declared unconstitutional, inactive gears heaved to life. The SC has gone so far to state that the 6, 296 FWBs of Luisita need not compensate the Cojuangco owners the amount of P835.55 million, instead demanding that Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI) distribute P1.33 billion worth of proceeds from the sale of land during the SDO period.
With the amount for just compensation of land decreased and the farmers’ fixed 3% share in profits, the FWBs, as inferred from the court’s ruling, actually end up getting paid both the land they till and a balance of cash of an amount of approximately Php 72,000.
Is the SC ruling the start for an Arab Spring, except in fungible goods like Starbucks sugar and Dole pineapples? Highly unlikely. But it could be, maybe, in the sense that Arab Spring sort of sputtered back to the Arab Winter. No, more like Arab Fall.
See, I am quite certain that these hacenderos are in the right places to clog, at the exact moment, any mustered political will and consequent capitalization efforts from, say, the financially-strained and rice-importing Department of Agriculture, to ensure a repetition of said process in the rest of Central Luzon, Cagayan, Bacolod, Panay, Bukidnon and all the usual suspects.
The Cojuangcos back in 1989 got the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P) to prove that farmers owning shares of land (read: not being owners) will actually be more profitable for the farmers than genuine ownership. Besides, hacienda corporations are able to answer a crucial need which sole operators may lack, which is market access (read: Starbucks). But that does not change the fact that such policy in its current execution is moot in terms of social justice.
And no one minds that National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) and a bunch of economists tried to disprove that with studies showing how farmers still gain more owning land albeit small (0.78 hectares of Luisita, for example) in contrast to mere shares.
Looking at it this way, the oligarchy is not the problem, because that ‘oligarchy’ is founded on a sheer fear that even non-oligarchs, actually many Filipinos, dread: a fear of change. Pinoys, ignoring their own inaction, love to cite weak political will and bad governance, which is in some sense valid. After all, the President, with his experiences in HLI, will not be giving in to radical reform in land compensation and capital assistance to farmers, not until he has ground corruption, in the form of ex-President Arroyo, to hell.
But wait, in the first place, who has given in to radical reform? Marcos and the KBL?
And what about us? I have good friends, very kind and amiable Lasallians, who are from hacendero families. Some, unfortunately, have already been jaded, instilled with the fear that ceding over land will lead to ultimate defeat in the dog-eat-dog game of Philippine land ownership. Is that the saddest part here: that these Lasallians will continue the ‘oligarchic oppression’?
No. Perhaps the saddest part is that most Lasallians do not even know what in heaven Hacienda Luisita is. I mean, since no one knows because everyone is too busy cramming papers or scoring empty 4.0s, no one can protest and hence no one can be that difference that Lasallians are called to be. Because when we mix the sugar into our saccharine sweet Starbucks caramel lattes, we do not even know where it came from or who packed it.
The fact of the matter is that we are drinking in Starbucks, and will most possibly be drinking cold subzero tonight. Now that’s a merry Christmas.
