As Chief Political Consultant of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), I extend my militant and patriotic greetings and solidarity to AMGL and farmworkers, including other rural poor who today suffer worsening conditions of poverty.
We unite and support your launching of People’s Camp Out “Knocking at the Heart and Taking Refuge—The Grief of having no Means of Livelihood and Suffering Hunger” from 19 to 21 of December. The attention of the whole nation must be called to your situation. The broad masses will surely understand your suffering and organizations and institutions will support you.
It is heart-rending that the periods of hardship or famine have intensified and lengthened because even during harvest time you have nothing to reap. Your livelihood is grabbed by greedy landlords-traders-usurers who own and/or operate harvesters. It is terrible that what used to be worked on by 20 farmworkers per hectare is now worked on only by three—an operator, the sack-holder for the threshed palay and the sack-sealer.
Its painful result is the widespread joblessness of farm workers most of whom are landless poor peasants. Even the gleaners of leftover grains have nothing to get and have no livelihood.
It is madness to import and increase harvesters in an agrarian and semifeudal economy with no developed industries to which those rendered jobless in the countryside can shift. Because of their savagery and greed, the landlord-traders-usurers do not realize they are playing with the fire of the revolution as they force the jobless and the hungry to rise up.
From the point of view of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and based on the program of the people’s democratic revolution, genuine agrarian reform and national industrialization must go hand-in-hand. These two are the means by which to provide employment to what we call the surplus population in the countryside.
Land in the hands of the landlords must be distributed free to landless peasants. The best time to mechanize agriculture is when it is related to the peasants’ cooperativization. The machines (tractors, seeding machines, irrigation pumps, harvesters, mills, warehouses and motor vehicles) are products of national industrialization.
In the current peace negotiations between the Duterte government and the NDFP, the drafting of the Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms is on the table. It is fine if patriotic and progressive elements from both parties cooperate on genuine agrarian reform and national industrialization and overcome the pro-imperialists and reactionaries who follow the neoliberal policies inside the Duterte government. It is fine if on the issue of land reform Ka Paeng Mariano and the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) could join in the research and drafting of the agreement.
I hope that the People’s Camp Out will be successful, realize its stated objectives and reap bountiful support from the ranks of peasants and all sectors of society.
Long live AMGL!
Long live the peasants and farmworkers!
Uphold genuine land reform and national industrialization!
More victories of the Filipino people for national and social liberation!
