AGRARIAN REFORM AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT. The worst semifeudal backwardness in the country is in the countryside. The peasant masses, farm workers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, national minorities and their families suffer from widespread poverty, high indebtedness, severe hunger and malnutrition. This is due to the persistent monopoly of land and other rural assets by landlords and agribusiness corporations both foreign and domestic. Millions of peasants and their families still do not own or control the land they till or have been forced into low-paying non-farm work for lack of land. Decades of so-called agrarian reform programs have failed to meaningfully distribute land to the peasantry or give them the means to make these productive. Haci- endas and plantations remain intact. Agricultural liberalization and deregulation have worsened food insecurity, increased land use conversion, intensified land- grabbing and corporate encroachments, worsened large-scale land reclamation that affects fisherfolk, and fuelled land speculation by real estate developers. Rural productivity remains low or other- wise dependent on expensive and ecologically destructive inputs and technologies pushed by foreign agribusiness corporations. Real agrarian reform and rural development are needed to release the productive forces in the countryside and to achieve national industrialization. They lay the ground for the economic, political, social and cultural liberation of the most numerous class in Phil- ippine society. This includes rural women who suffer the double burden of poverty and underdevelopment under discriminatory conditions and also the indigenous peoples and national minorities who are violently displaced from their ancestral domain. Many lessons can be learned from the countryside where the People’s Democratic Government (PDG) is operative and imple- ments its revolutionary agrarian reform program. It harnesses the collective efforts of the organs of political power, the New People’s Army (NPA), the revolutionary mass organizations of peasants, rural women and youth, indigenous peoples and the Bangsamoro, and thus has the support and participation of the broad masses of the people.
