The Estrada government is promoting plantations oriented for export crop production instead of land distribution, serving the interest of greedy foreign monopoly capitalists. This is a total abandonment of the principle "land to the tillers", Rafael Mariano, Chairperson of KMP said.

KMP is spearheading the struggle in the Philippines to implement genuine agrarian reform that provides land to landless small farmers and peasants with sufficient support for sustainable rural livelihoods, economies and futures independent of TNCs.

Mariano criticised the Estrada administration’s commitment to the World Trade Organisation in promoting the World Bank‘s imposition of "Market Assisted Land Reform", or private sector land reform. This involves joint venture schemes that allow landlords and foreign capitalists to appropriate land.

"In effect, the schemes reduce the farmers to being farm-workers receiving measly wages not even on a regular basis to augment their daily need for food and sustenance," Mariano said.

Thousands of farmers and their families in the vast countryside are now in dire poverty and hunger as they are forcibly evicted from the lands they have tilled for decades to pave the way for land use conversion, "corporative schemes", or joint venture schemes, KMP said.

For Sarojeni Rengam, Executive Director of the Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP), these schemes encourage poor farmers to be dependent on loans to cover costs of production, and increases in the use of pesticides for crop protection.

"This in effect will burden farmers with more debts, threaten food safety and security," Rengam said.

"People across Asia are already suffering from hunger and poverty due to the past massive displacements of peasants from their lands and the ongoing conversion of agricultural lands. Farmers view these current developments with great concern because this threatens food safety, security, health, and livelihoods," Rengam added.

To contest these dire developments, PAN AP, together with KMP, other non-governmental organisations, farmers, landless peasants, farm workers, and anti-pesticide and anti-genetic engineering advocates in India, Bangladesh and the Philippines, is launching a People’s Caravan from 13-30 November. "Activities will also be held by farmers in Japan, Korea and Indonesia to support the Caravan", Rengam said.

"The People’s Caravan demanding land and food without poisons will be the peasant agenda to whoever will replace Estrada. We will continue to struggle until genuine land reform and agro-chemical TNC’s control over our lands is ended," said KMP.

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