THE Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas on Tuesday slammed the National Economic and Development Authority for issuing a statement presumptuously claiming that President Rodrigo Duterte will most likely not sign the draft executive order imposing a two-year ban on land conversion.
KMP said the draft executive order is said to have been the result of a proposal by the Department of Agrarian Reform Secretary Rafael Mariano to the Presidential Agrarian Reform Commission last year, the final and official issuance of which the KMP and other militant organizations have since been anticipating.
KMP Secretary General Antonio Flores said in a statement that Neda Director General Ernesto Pernia is “cunningly trying to condition the public against the ban on land conversion by making up utterly false and deceiving arguments.”
Last October, Pernia and other members of Malacanang’s economic team, including Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III, Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno and Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez issued a position paper against the proposed ban on land conversion, citing the adverse effect that the said ban might have on the economy.
“It is absolutely not true that a ban will adversely affect economic growth, job generation and poverty reduction. On the contrary, prohibiting land conversion will arrest the decrease of land area size available for rice and other agricultural production which, for years, has caused the massive dislocation of farmers and the worsening state of the country’s food security,” Flores said.
According to the National Statistics Office, over 800,000 hectares of agricultural lands have already been converted to other uses since 1972.
KMP also refuted the economic managers’ contention that a land conversion ban will affect the efforts of the government to clear its housing backlog which currently stands at around 5.5 million units.
“The housing backlog argument is not only false but highly hypocritical. Land use conversion has been going on for years but this has not at all mitigated the housing problem. We should in fact look into the housing problem as a question also of unemployment in the cities and the continuous exodus into urban areas of rural folk who have been displaced economically and physically because of landlessness brought about by, among other reasons, land conversion itself,” Flores said.
KMP also expressed its disapproval of the economic managers’ counter-proposal to the land conversion ban, the enactment of a land use code, which the group said would only facilitate the intensified plunder of the national patrimony by big landlords, foreign agribusiness, large-scale mining conglomerates, logging concessions, aquaculture and tourism monopolies, and real estate speculators.
“President Duterte should immediately sign the executive order to ban land conversion, he should also certify as urgent the proposed bill on genuine agrarian reform and free land distribution – the Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill or House Bill 555 authored by Anakpawis Partylist and the Makabayan bloc in Congress — which for us is the ultimate land use program as this will effectively redirect land use policy to benefit the majority of the people, the millions of landless farmers who produce for the country, ” Flores said.