Senators urged to hear out peasants on JPEPA
Inquirer (Manila) 11/08/2007
Senators urged to hear out peasants on JPEPA
By Jerome Aning
Inquirer
MANILA, Philippines — The militant Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP, Peasant Movement of the Philippines) led militant groups in a protest at the Senate Thursday during the body’s ongoing hearings for the ratification of the Japan-Philippine Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA).
The protesters brought rice and salt in front of the Senate building to show what they said will remain of Philippine agriculture if JPEPA were approved. They also carried placards saying “Ilibing ang JPEPA (Bury JPEPA)!” and “JPEPAtay,” a combination of the acronym and the Tagalog word for death.
Willy Marbella, deputy secretary general of KMP, said the group hopes senators would listen to “genuine peasants” that the free trade treaty would ultimately lead to eviction and hunger.
“We are definitely against the JPEPA, because the real ’gainers’ will be foreign transnational companies (TNCs) based in the Philippines and their domestic partners and not genuinely Filipino industry and agriculture, much less Filipino workers and farmers as a whole,” Marbella said.
These “corporate elites,” he said, would will be profiting from providing Japan with cheap labor, minerals and agricultural raw materials aside from exemption from tariffs of 239 products “while the only things left to us peasants are rice and salt.”
Marbella also hit the government for making much hype about the supposed export gain from a more open Japanese market for Philippine bananas and pineapples.
“They are not saying that tariffs on these items will be reduced on a staggered basis in the coming years. However food exports are actually a small and even diminishing share of total Philippine exports to Japan and accounted for only 7.4 percent of total exports to it over the period 2001-2006,” Marbella explained.
And while food exports potentially have high local content and significant linkages to the local economy, grassroots farmers and farm workers are in practice unlikely to benefit, he added.
This, he said, was because the actual benefits to Filipino peasants are severely limited by two circumstances of the local banana and pineapple industry.
The first is that agricultural production in general — including of bananas and pineapples — “is very backward and underdeveloped because of the lack of true land reform and the absence of government support and services.”
For instance, almost half of the banana farms in the Philippines are still under tenanted or lease arrangements, added the peasant leader
“The backward production methods means that most farms are not really being in a position to access the Japanese market; the fruits produced are unable to meet strict Japanese aesthetic, sanitary and other quality standards,” he said.
Freshness would also be a problem, Marbella said, because the transport, storage and marketing infrastructure to bring the fruits from Filipino farms to Japanese consumers are not in place.
None of these issues is likely to be resolved anytime in the near future, he added.
The KMP leader said the second and more decisive factor is that Philippine agriculture is grossly inequitable with corporate agri-business and rural elites cornering the benefits from production at the expense of landless tenants, farm workers and other agricultural labor.
“Feudal or otherwise exploitative economic arrangements still persist in the vast Philippine countryside. So, even in the case of any farms actually in a position to take advantage of the Japanese market, the gains will not really be going to the poorest peasants,” he explained.
In fact, he warned, more land displacement would occur because of the expansion of plantations forcing more farmers to poverty.
This will also pose a danger to the food security of the nation due to crop conversion from rice and corn to banana and pineapple, Marbella added.
In the end, KMP said the greatest benefit from any increased banana and pineapple exports resulting from JPEPA will go to the big foreign agri-business TNCs (and their big domestic corporate growers) that account for virtually all banana and pineapple exports from the Philippines.
These include Dole, the world’s largest exporter of fresh bananas and the second largest in fresh pineapples, and Del Monte, the world’s largest fresh pineapple exporter and the second largest in bananas.
“These TNCs have vertically integrated operations spanning the growing of the products in plantations, specialized packaging and storage, transportation, shipping and distribution. They also have total control of the associated capital and technologies,” Marbella said.
