Download and read the article here: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss50/21/?fbclid=IwY2xjawTwxWRwZG9mBWV4dG4DYWVtAjEwAGJyaWQRMTIwbkx4VHB3ZUdnbVNmYjJzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeilVDygcYbSyRbqAgAaa8Qy383JRr4xegIkpno6TmtoA4zvIMCH5eRuT2xgA_aem_LNVLyqCIFpiSMw5E4ijo0Q

Deeper Ground, Darker Shadows stands apart from many books already written about the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) because it is an extensive insider account from someone who began in the rank and file in Mindanao and rose to the New People’s Army (NPA) General Command. Its value is heightened by candid revelations about “James Bourne”-like international work of the communist insurgency at its peak in the 1980s, including working relations with the Japanese Red Army. Above all, the book is honest and self-critical, steering clear of both pure vilification and romanticization of the armed struggle. Highly recommended.

For the first time in over a decade, the Philippines’ major agrarian movements, joined by climate justice advocates, came together in a historic protest campout outside the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) Central Office in Quezon City. On June 8–11, tents, hammocks, and protest banners lined the Elliptical Road, as more than 500 peasants, farmworkers, indigenous peoples, fishers, women, youth, rights activists, and climate advocates filled the streets outside the DAR. 

This unprecedented unity under the newly formed coalition called the June 10 Land Rights Committee (J10LRC) signaled a renewed, broad-based initiative to bring agrarian reform back onto the national agenda. The 38th anniversary of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) became a rallying point to pressure the government to act on the long-unfulfilled promise of social justice and pro-poor rural development.

During the protest action, peasant leaders and J10LRC advocates held dialogues with DAR officials in the agency. Protest turnout peaked on the morning of June 10, the actual CARP anniversary, with nearly 1,000 workers, urban poor, women, and youth joining the campout participants.

Their message was clear: Agrarian reform is not merely an issue for peasants and other rural working people, but the foundation for food sovereignty, climate justice, and people-centered development for every Filipino.

Challenge

The J10LRC issued a direct challenge to Agrarian Secretary Conrado Estrella III: Face the protesters and resolve 30 longstanding agrarian reform cases, or confront the coalition’s intent to take the fight directly to the Office of the President and to scrutinize the DAR budget in Congress.

“Secretary Estrella spends his time vlogging,” said Claro Pasion, national president of the Kilusan para sa Repormang Agraryo at Katarungang Panlipunan (or Katarungan). “We would like to remind him that he is a secretary, not a social media influencer. He needs to face us, immediately resolve the cases we presented, address widespread land rights violations, investigate anomalous decisions, expedite pending cases, and [remove] erring DAR officials.”

Pasion said Estrella’s recent vlogs are part of efforts to rehabilitate the legacy of his grandfather, Conrado Estrella Sr., who served as minister of agrarian reform under the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. 

The bulk of the campout participants came from Southern Luzon, especially Quezon Province and Mindoro, and Central Luzon, but there were also representatives from Eastern Samar, Leyte, Negros Occidental, and as far as Davao del Norte in Mindanao. The protesters’ demands are rooted in nearly four decades of broken promises. For many, CARP’s anniversary is not a cause for celebration. 

“Instead of celebrating, we farmers are filled with sadness and anger on this CARP anniversary, given the staggering volume of land rights violations and unresolved cases plaguing farmers nationwide,” said Luz Bador, honorary president of the Pambansang Koalisyon ng Kababaihan sa Kanayunan (PKKK).

Estrella did not face the protesters during the campout. He appeared instead in a vlog on another issue, filmed from a hospital bed.

Cases that can’t wait

To dramatize the plight of small farmers, protesters plastered a giant mock-up of a certificate of land ownership award (CLOA) on the DAR gate, symbolizing the 38-year wait of the Filipino farmer. 

Among the cases presented by the farmers to DAR officials are the delayed implementation of agrarian reform decisions and the non-installation of agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) despite favorable rulings or the issuance of CLOAs. These include the Manuel Uy Ek Liong estate in San Narciso, Quezon Province; Carballo and Mendieta in Tanjay, Negros Oriental; Hacienda Fernandez Hermanos in Davao del Norte; Haciendas Rodriguez, Leonardia, and Magdalira of Pontevedra in Negros Occidental; Don Carlos, Bukidnon; and among ARBs in Medellin and Toledo City, Cebu. 

They also highlighted the unresolved implementation of the homelot provision for 6,296 ARBs in Hacienda Luisita, Tarlac—a case emblematic of the enduring challenges of agrarian reform in the Philippines.

The farmers also cited the land reform reversals, including the cancellation of CLOAs in Sariaya, Quezon, and retention claims that threaten previously awarded lands in Maliwalo, Tarlac.

These issues of land dispossession are compounded by the growing criminalization, harassment, and violence faced by peasant leaders. In Sumalo, Hermosa, Bataan, for instance, leaders are accused, they say unjustly, of over 50 administrative, civil, and criminal cases. 

The farmers cite as well a broader trend of agricultural land-use conversion, intensifying corporate land grabs, and increasing land reconcentration.

“What is deeply painful for us farmers in Sariaya is that the CLOAs already awarded to us were revoked,” lamented Efren Mendoza of the Ugnayan ng Magsasaka sa Sariaya, Quezon. “We nurtured this land and worked hard to make it productive. But now, they are claiming it is not agricultural land.”

Substantial but undermined progress

Despite strong landlord resistance, substantial progress was made in land redistribution, especially in the 1990s and early 2000s, due to robust grassroots mobilization and alliances between agrarian movements and reform-minded officials. Through these efforts referred to as the “bibingka strategy,” almost half of all agricultural land—including public, private, and forest lands—were redistributed, benefiting roughly three-fifths of peasant households.

Yet, these significant but partial redistributive gains have been undermined by a host of new and persistent challenges. 

Neoliberal policies have liberalized agricultural imports and reduced government support for small farmers, while rapid urbanization has converted vast swathes of rural land to nonagricultural uses. Today, half of all Filipinos live in urban areas. At the same time, peasants and agrarian communities are becoming ever more vulnerable to the intensifying impacts of climate change. Ultimately, these combined pressures have steadily eroded the rural working people’s ability to make a living in agriculture. 

As the landscape of agrarian struggles evolves, land struggles are increasingly intertwined with pressing concerns over food sovereignty and climate justice.

Milestone

The protest campout was a milestone not only for its broad unity and militancy but also for reframing public understanding of land and agrarian reform. This broadening of the fronts of land struggles was encapsulated in the banner slogan, “Lupa, Pagkain, Hustisya sa Klima—Ipaglaban (Fight for land, food, and climate justice),” which complemented the declaration that agrarian reform remains unfinished business. 

“The root cause of our food crisis is government neglect and the total abandonment of our farmers—the very hands that feed our nation,” said Laica Rayel, senior campaign officer at the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice (PMCJ). “Unless our officials act on this immediately, the future of the Philippines is doomed.” 

The PMCJ underscored how unresolved land disputes, land reform reversals, and widespread harassment and criminalization of farmers have led to a cycle of dispossession and poverty. It said these injustices, in turn, aggravate food insecurity and threaten the country’s ability to withstand climate shocks.

“Landlessness is one of the major burdens on Filipino farmers, not only in securing our food supply but also in weathering supercharged climate events,” Rayel said.

The J10LRC and its allies said the four-day campout was only the beginning. “We vow to hold the line until every single farmer across the Philippines is awarded the land they till, and provided the comprehensive government support they urgently need,” Pasion said.

The J10LRC is composed of Katarungan, PMCJ, PKKK, Pagkakaisa Para sa Tunay na Repormang Agraryo (Paragos) Pilipinas, Alter Trade Foundation Inc., Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino, Pambansang Kaisahan ng Magbubukid sa Pilipinas, Makabayang Alyansa ng Magbubukid ng Pilipinas,  Aniban ng Manggagawa sa Agrikultura, Focus on the Global South, Pambansang Kilusan ng mga Samahang Magsasaka, Task Force Mapalad National Peasant Federation, Pambansang Katipunan ng Makabayang Magbubukid, Pambansang Katipunan ng mga Samahan sa Kanayunan, Samahang Nagkakaisang Magsasaka ng Barangay Sumalo, and Katipunan ng Bagong Pilipina. It is supported by Kamanggagawa Partylist, Akbayan Partylist, Oriang, K4K-QC, Lilak (Purple Action for Indigenous Women’s Rights), and other allied groups.

Where are we now with agrarian reform in the Philippines? On June 10, 38 years would have passed since the enactment of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. Earlier this year, Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) Secretary Conrado M. Estrella III told the media that only 700,000 hectares of agricultural land remain to be redistributed. After four decades of continuous implementation, the government claims that agrarian reform is almost complete.

However, an emerging coalition named the “June 10 Land Rights Committee,” is questioning claims that agrarian reform can already be concluded. Agrarian and climate justice movements that compose this committee point to the unfinished business of agrarian reform in the country. Many rural working people have yet to benefit from land redistribution, even as the lack of state support has compelled many beneficiaries to sell their lands.

Research we have conducted with the national rural working peoples’ movement KATARUNGAN or Kilusan para sa Repormang Agraryo at Katarungang Panlipunan identifies four interconnected challenges faced by the agrarian sector: reform reversals and land reconcentration; contestations over conflicting land laws and overlapping claims; escalating capitalist land grabs and violence; and a deepening price scissors between higher farming costs and low farm gate prices, resulting in the loss of agrarian livelihoods.

Significant but partial land redistribution was made possible through the “bibingka strategy” of strong peasant mobilization from below and coalition-building with state reformers in the 1990s and early 2000s. This resulted in the redistribution of nearly half of the country’s 13 million hectares of agriculturally productive lands including alienable and disposable public lands, private agricultural lands and forest lands covered under Community-Based Forest Management Program, which benefited about three-fifths of all peasant households.

But neoliberal policies of liberalizing agricultural imports and slashing government support services for farmers have challenged the gains made by agrarian movements. The past four decades have also seen rapid urbanization and the expansion of metropolitan areas like Metro Manila, which have increasingly absorbed rural land and labor for nonagricultural activities. Reflecting global trends, almost 50 percent of the Philippine population now lives in urban areas. This development has come alongside the rise of a large reserve of jobless or near-jobless working people with precarious livelihoods and food insecurity. Meanwhile, the intensifying impacts of climate change have exposed peasants and other rural working people to unpredictable weather and ecological shocks. Together, these factors have eroded their capacity to sustain their livelihoods on the land, making dispossession a gradual yet persistent reality.

The shifting political and socio-ecological landscape has exposed the limits of relying solely on land redistribution for attaining agrarian justice, pro-poor rural development, and sovereign industrialization. This is why contemporary agrarian movements are advancing a holistic framework for agrarian reform: the 4Rs—Redistribution, Recognition, Restitution, and Regulation. The 4Rs, now pushed by a broad global coalition of social movements, progressive academics, and rights advocates, were crystallized into an agenda during the Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) in Cartagena, Colombia, in February 2026.

Redistribution remains essential, but it must be complemented by recognition of the diverse land rights of indigenous peoples, women, and youth, as well as the customary and communal tenure systems that persist outside formal titles. Restitution is necessary to address past and ongoing injustices and to provide reparations for dispossession and displacement. Regulation is crucial to prevent new waves of land grabbing, set limits on accumulation, prevent agricultural land-use conversion, and ensure that land serves people’s needs, including food and housing, for the present and the future.

Agrarian and climate justice movements and advocates will be trooping to the DAR Central Office on June 10 to highlight issues of land grabbing, reform reversals, and unfinished land redistribution. But this is only the beginning. Philippine agrarian reform today stands at a crossroads. To move forward, it must transcend a narrow focus on redistribution alone and embrace the holistic 4Rs agenda, reimagining agrarian reform as a living, ongoing process that links democratic land control with food sovereignty and climate justice.

Sheila and I presented our paper on agrarian reform and rural-agrarian struggles in the Philippines at the International Conference on Autonomous Social Sciences and Alternative Development in Times of Multiple Crises on May 21-23 at IPB University in Bogor, Indonesia. A two hour ride from Jakarta, IPB University is the top-ranked university in Southeast Asia in the fields of agriculture and forestry studies.

Drawing on our volunteer work with the national rural working people’s movement KATARUNGAN, our paper argues that the experience of CARP highlights the limits of redistribution alone, especially without sustained state support for economic and ecological sustainability. While CARP secured significant gains during periods of strong peasant mobilization and coalition-building in the 1990s and early 2000s, these advances have since been undermined by neoliberal agricultural policies and aggressive land reform reversals.

Our paper points to the need to move beyond the traditional agrarian reform paradigm centered mainly on land redistribution, and instead ground agrarian reform in the holistic framework of the 4Rs: Redistribution, Recognition, Restitution, and Regulation

The full version of our presentation will be published as a discussion paper at the UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies: https://cids.up.edu.ph/discussion_paper/where-are-we-now-state-agrarian-reform-rural-agrarian-struggles-philippines-perspective-contemporary-agrarian-movement/.

During the Holy Week, Sheila and I brought Giap for field work with the national peasant and rural working peoples’ movement KATARUNGAN across the hacienda belt of Bondoc Peninsula, Quezon where we met peasant leaders and fisher peoples, visiting their farms, homes, and cooperatives. Travelling by land over 300-kilometers south of the national capital gave us a chance to see firsthand what we’ve long heard in stories and read in reports and studies, including Jennifer Franco’s classic study Bound by Law (2011). We found the checkered legacy of agrarian reform, which has brought both partial but significant gains and unfinished struggles.

In many areas, peasant resistance has led to land redistribution. In places like the 1,700-hectare Hacienda Matias in San Francisco town, where landlord resistance was fiercest, the struggle was also the most intense. Peasant leaders who sought to claim their land rights through the government’s land reform program CARP were intimidated and killed by landlord goons and communist insurgents. The landowner enclosed the entire sitio, sealing its gate as collective punishment. In the end, organized resistance forced the land to be redistributed.

In the vast Villa Reyes estate, spanning San Narciso and San Andres towns, much of the 12,000 hectares has been redistributed through CARP. The once-dominant hacienda manor overlooking the sea now stands abandoned. The grip of the powerful Reyes landlord clan over local politics has also been broken.

But the story does not end there. Many peasants still continue to struggle for their land rights. Coastal communities face displacement as investors eye beachfronts where fisherpeoples dock their boats and build their homes. Many others who have secured land now confront new challenges: lack of state support, pressures from trade liberalization, and the difficulty of making farming sustainable. Many beneficiaries have also been forced to sell their land in informal markets. While others struggle to maintain unity in their peasant associations, make their cooperatives sustainable, and transition toward agroecological practices. The pasyon of the Filipino peasant continues. 

I spent two meaningful weeks in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia to attend the second International Conference on Land, Life and Society. This gathering set the stage for the Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) organized by the Government of Colombia and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, where grassroots movements, government leaders, and academics come together to discuss some of the world’s most urgent challenges: land rights, agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and the climate crisis.

I am grateful for what has been an overall productive engagement and deep learning experience. I spent 25 hours of travel halfway across the World to Colombia from Manila and vice versa. I presented my co-authored paper with Sheila during the academic conference. Our paper invites a rethinking of the Agrarian Question in the Philippines especially in light of the profound transformations of the agrarian political economy in the last four decades and the ongoing multiple crises of food, climate, and neoliberal capitalism.

I am also honored to have taken part in reading the Cartagena Declaration in the conclusion of the academic conference at the Claustro de la Merced in Cartagena de Indias — the final resting place of Gabriel García Márquez. I served on the declaration’s drafting committee, along with other scholars from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The declaration’s contents were shaped by the 3-day discussions and debates of 410 participants representing 321 universities, research institutions, and academic organizations from around the world.

Beyond the conference plenaries and the field visit to the Sabana Alta estate, which was redistributed by the Gustavo Petro government to campesinos in Turbaco, Colombia — simply being in Cartagena was an experience in itself.

I spent time in the old town of Cartagena, a vibrant tourist district filled with historic sites and scenic views facing the Caribbean Sea. Every night is literally a party. They even have something called a “disco bus” where you dance and drink while driving around the city. Also for the first time ever, I rode a yacht for a party after the academic sessions.

Of course, being a tourist city has its downsides. Cartagena is insanely expensive, and like many major destinations, there are also problems such as prostitution and petty crimes, so you really have to stay alert against scams and theft especially when walking at night.

That said, it’s fascinating to be in the same Caribbean region where Gabriel García Márquez once lived. Being there, I can somehow understand how the place inspired his magical realism.

El Menu de la Casa, an eatery for working people, at Centro Comercial y Empresarial, Calle 25, just a few meters’ walk from the Convention Center, saved me from the expensive restaurants of Cartagena, one of the most expensive tourist destinations on this continent.

We had free lunch during the academic conference, but none at ICARRD+20 itself so I had lunch here with fellow comrades the whole week. My favorite is chuleta frita — crispy pan-fried pork chop served with rice, beans, banana, and vegetables — with sopa. Only 14,000 Colombian pesos (a little over 200 Philippine pesos).

Fortunately, there was no disruption of my return flight to the Philippines due to the insane US-Israeli war on Iran. That was my first time in Colombia and what an experience it has been.

Some local Philippine media outlets also took notice and published the following articles on my participation in ICARRD+20 and the academic conference:

https://cebudailynews.inquirer.net/701717/filipino-scholar-urges-fresh-look-at-agrarian-reform-at-international-conference-in-colombia

https://www.sunstar.com.ph/cebu/cebuano-scholar-urges-fresh-look-at-agrarian-reform-at-colombia-conference

My top reads of 2025 include books on agrarian political economy and land politics which are very helpful for ongoing writing and research; insightful biographies / political reflections by ex-guerrilla cadre Eddie Quitoriano, scholar-activist Walden Bello, Filipino Marxist Dodong Nemenzo, and Huk cadre Bart Pasion; novels by Victor Serge and Andrei Platonov and a book monograph dealing with the Soviet revolutionary and state-building experiences and their excesses (daghang salamat sa nag-donate).

Finally managed to finish “Seeing Like a State” (1998) by James Scott after putting it off for far too long. I enjoyed the most Quitoriano’s “Deeper Ground, Darker Shadows” (2025), which reads like a spy-thriller, historical record, and socio-political critique all packed into one.

I found Borras and Franco’s “Essential Concepts of Land Politics” (2025) to be the most useful. This list doesn’t include books I had to reread or those I didn’t manage to finish, mostly for writing purposes.

We also joined sessions on the peasant question organized by the Manila office of the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE), linked to the Tri-People movement of indigenous Lumad, Muslim Moro, and Christian settlers in Mindanao. We also sat in the Food Sovereignty Conference organized by the PKMM (Pambansang Katipunan ng Makabayang Magbubukid, or National Federation of Patriotic Peasants) for World Food Day 2025.

Capping off the year this December and synthesizing our understanding of key concepts in land politics was the week-long seminar on agrarian political economy and agroecology organized by KATARUNGAN and other organizations, where we learned alongside peasant leaders and community organizers. On her birthday, Sheila had our copy of Essential Concepts of Land Politics (2025) signed by its author, Jun Borras, the lead facilitator of the workshop.

Altogether it’s been an eye-opening experience, grounding our research in lived struggles and offering valuable insight into how our scholarly work might contribute to revitalizing contemporary agrarian movements and reimagining post-capitalist futures. Kasarinlan sa pagkain, lupa, at bayan ipaglaban!

Previous indicators—such as tenancy, sharecropping, concentration, or wage labor—were found to be by themselves inadequate markers of capitalist presence. Yet the transition from tenancy to wage labor farming, the replacement of servile and bonded labor with free, cash-paid workers, and substantial investments in modern agriculture, which boosted productivity, could not be dismissed easily either. The focus of the Indian debates thus shifted from questioning the existence of capitalism to exploring the type of capitalism that emerged and its impact on class relations.

What struck me was how the Indian debate resonates with the Philippines’ own debates on modes of production during the 1980s and the subsequent split in the communist movement in the 1990s.

The contending positions in the Philippine debates examined the same agrarian economy, which is linked to global capitalism, yet they arrived at opposing conclusions. Those who remained in the CPP orthodoxy stressed the persistence of semi-feudal relations, interpreted the situation as “half-glass empty” to justify the continuation of its rural armed insurgency. Many of those who rejected the CPP, by contrast, saw “half-glass full”—a form of backward capitalism—arguing that this called for prioritizing workers’ organizing in the urban centers. In this sense, both semi-feudal and backward-capitalist interpretations remained captive to a stageist, linear conception of “national” development. They differed only in where they located the Philippines on that trajectory. However, recent trends related to neoliberal globalization, such as the decline of agriculture, rapid urbanization, but also the absence of significant industrial growth, have pulled the rug over these contending interpretive frames.

What may be needed is a reframing of the question altogether: moving beyond capitalist penetration as the sole yardstick for revolutionary strategy, and instead toward a more holistic view of how social relations (including but not limited to capital–labor relations) and the balance of forces at a given conjuncture can either enable or constrain possibilities for radical transformation.

The sessions, held partly at China Agricultural University (CAU) in Beijing and in Sanggang Village, Hebei County, were both productive and deeply insightful. The Writeshop gave invaluable and rigorous feedback on an article that Sheila and I have co-authored inviting scholars and activists to rethink the agrarian question in the Philippines.

The discussions on critical agrarian studies and scholar-activism by Jun Borras and other JPS editors made me realize how I was very much like the proverbial frog in the well, yet as another saying goes, the journey of a thousand li begins with a single step.

We’re truly grateful to all the people in the Writeshop for the opportunity and the warm camaraderie.

For me, the most striking moment in the book was the author’s unflinching critique of CPP founder and ideologue Jose Maria Sison, whom she described as having “delusions of grandeur.” However, the bulk of the memoir is not focused on the CPP at all. It’s about the life that followed as a migrant in the Netherlands.

What stood out to many students was the idea that resistance doesn’t end when one leaves a movement. Some noted that true commitment involves continually reassessing one’s alignment with a cause and having the courage to walk away when it no longer aligns with one’s convictions, or even critique it. Butalid’s story also highlighted for others the value of contributing to social change through peaceful means such as education, outreach, organizing, and writing, in contrast to seeing them as instrumental only to armed struggle as always-already the primary repertoire of contention.

Toward the end of the book, the author reminisces about growing up on P. del Rosario St. in Cebu City. Her memories evoked my childhood as I recalled being a child in the late ’90s and early 2000s, accompanying my late father, Anol, to his newspaper office located in the same neighborhood.

Chasing Windmills may not be as action-packed as some might expect from a memoir about the dictatorship years, but its introspection, honesty, and quiet wisdom make it a compelling and essential read. Thanks to Earl Parreno for recommending this book. It is available at Lost Books Cebu and PGX – Peoples’ Global Exchange.

The novel is a daring and gripping work that weaves in the bloody purges carried out by the Communist Party of the Philippines and how foreign funding (pX) for NGO projects intended to support the armed struggle (ghost, credible reality, full implementation) can fall prey to corruption within the movement.

Dehn’s book offers a bold fictionalized look at a controversial and often overlooked chapter in the history of the Philippine Left, building on earlier works like Bobby Garcia’s To Suffer Thy Comrades or Nathan Quimpo’s scholarship on the financial work of the underground movement.

The book is available for sale at the PGX – Peoples’ Global Exchange shop at Mahiyan cor. Maningning Streets, Quezon City.