By the Peasant Movement of the Philippines (Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, KMP) /
The following is an excerpt from Decoding the World Bank’s SPLIT Project in the Philippines: Resisting Agrarian Injustice by Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, Paghida-et sa Kauswagan Development Group, People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty, the Centre for Economic and Social Rights, and IBON International.
Social movements and civil society have long criticized the World Bank’s promotion of
policies that subsume global South countries under a world economic system dominateby big business and elites in the global North. Loan conditions have been a lever to
promote neoliberal policies, such as the privatization of social services, the liberalization
of economies for capital, and deregulation of economic activities to encourage investors.
These allowed free rein for profit-oriented activities in the global South and consolidated
the State’s roles as facilitators of profit, at the expense of peoples’ rights and ecological
sustainability.
What role has the World Bank played in market-assisted agrarian reform in the Philippines?
The Philippines was an early member of the World Bank, starting in 1945, and among the top borrowers from the Bank by 2021. Agriculture has been a key area of Bank interventions. It provided funding and technical assistance to the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Programme (CARP), for example. Established in 1988, CARP aimed to redistribute agricultural land — typically owned by large landowners and corporations — to qualifying agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs), such as landless farmers and farmworkers. ARBs were granted Certificates of Land Ownership Awards (CLOAs). But, they were required to pay for the land they received through installment payments over an extended period.
In 1998, ten years into CARP, the World Bank criticized the programme, but blamed its shortcomings on state inefficiency. In its assessment, the state-led land reform was costly in having to compensate landowners; bogged down by slow implementation; facing landowners’ resistance. It described the government’s land reform as being “undermined by disputes, delays and inefficiencies”.
In line with the Bank’s ideological belief in state inefficiency and market efficiency, it promoted market-assisted land reform (MALR), which “aims to encourage willing buyers to negotiate deals [and land prices] with willing sellers.” This replaces a state-led expropriative land reform process with a transactional one — with the government’s role reduced to “facilitating the process through grants and other supportive measures”.
But the argument for the leasing and sale of awarded lands in a so-called vibrant and “free” land market disregards the reality of land monopoly. More than half (52%) of the total area of farmlands are in the hands of just 11% of owners.
The real shortcomings of CARP are that it exempted large landholdings from redistribution; avoided actual land redistribution, by offering shares of stock in landlords’ corporations; and increasing corporatisation, by converting agricultural land through commercial use and agri-business venture arrangements. Government data reveals that between 1980 and 2012, the percentage of farmholdings “fully-owned” by its operators dropped from 58% to 46%, decreasing by 12%. By 2021, 540,000 hectares covered by CARP remain undistributed. Several studies, including ones commissioned or undertaken by the World Bank, DAR, and Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) admit that the program has had, at most, “muted” and “modest” achievements, and was “not fully successful.”
The Philippines is a country with a history of agrarian unrest and land monopolies, which has shaped the political economy of agrarian reform up to the present. Landed elites still either hold influence or are directly in power. For social movements such as the Peasant Movement of the Philippines (Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas), whose origins and long- standing demands revolve around the peasant struggle for land, agrarian reform has failed to break up land monopolies and rein in the vested interests behind large landholdings. As a result, it has failed to address socio-economic inequalities, advance social justice, and to defend peasant rights. Land reform struggles have also been marked by state violence.
The SPLIT project needs to be looked at in this context. It is also part of a bigger wave of policies that facilitate expanded land markets and increase the “ease of doing business” in agriculture, especially export-oriented agriculture. This includes the recently passed New Agrarian Emancipation Act and the proposed National Land Use Act, among others. The direction it sets is likely to intensify the concentration of land into the landed and moneyed few.
What is the SPLIT project?
The Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT) is a project of the World Bank Group and the Philippines’ Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR). It was introduced in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to improve land tenure security and stabilize the property rights of ARBs. It does this by subdividing collective CLOAs into individual titles. These are property instruments “that clearly show their absolute ownership.”
According to the DAR, the project addresses issues that have arisen in collective CLOAs. These include “boundary conflicts, susceptibility to encroachment by non-beneficiaries, impediments in land amortization payments”. These issues negatively impact ARBs’ ownership of their awarded lands. They eventually hold “insecure and unstable property rights” as a result.
Concurring, the World Bank has declared that “[the] insecurity of property rights… is the natural consequence of lack of individual land titles”. By issuing individual titles, it expects ARBs to have greater access to credit, because they can use their titled land as collateral; be able to sell or lease the land after full payment of amortization; and possibly enjoy higher foreign investment in agriculture. This, in turn, will supposedly provide ARBs with funds to increase productivity through mechanization, use of hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers, crop diversification, and additional on-farm activities, among others. The government is also meant to benefit from streamlined amortization payments and taxes from increased importation of agricultural inputs.
Founded on the fundamental flaws of the Philippine government’s agrarian reform programme, SPLIT is only set to worsen the problems it professes it aims to resolve. DAR’s insistence on the superiority of individual CLOAs rests upon contradicting data. It cites a 2015 survey which indicated that collective CLOAs are more susceptible to illicit transfers and land-use conversion than individual ones. But the same survey revealed that those under collective CLOAs had higher average farm and total household incomes than those under individual ones. These numbers fail to consider the impact of onerous AVAs on ARBs under collective CLOAs, and suggest a negative relationship between ownership and economic goals, among others.
The assurance of ARBs’ land rights has not been fully guaranteed only by CLOAs – regardless if they are collective or individual. In fact there have been cases when collective CLOAs have been used to undermine peasant control of the land, particularly through onerous agribusiness contracts imposed upon the beneficiaries. For such cases, SPLIT remains inconsequential as it exempts corporate farms. Ultimately, CLOAs carry with them the fundamental flaws of CARP. Further, there are serious doubts about the supposedly voluntary nature of SPLIT. The World Bank’s project document states that “ARBs wishing to continue to farm their land in a communal manner can opt out of the parcelization process”. However, the same document categorizes the project as having a “high” environmental and social risk, including the displacement of occupants, land boundary disputes, contested inheritances, and the sale of awarded lands.
In compliance with the World Bank’s Environment and Social Framework, the DAR prepared risk management and mitigation options, including a resettlement policy framework and a stakeholder engagement plan. These documents laid down guidelines in facing some identified risks, most notably advising to defer the parcelization of contested collective CLOAs, and allocating resettlement and compensation for affected ARBs. It also designed a Grievance and Redress Mechanism to accept and respond to grievances exclusively about the implementation of SPLIT. The effectiveness of these documents can only be measured in real world cases.
Overall, SPLIT fails to respect, protect, and fulfill peasants’ rights. It poses a range of harms, including compulsory parcelization of land, worsening militarisation, more disputes among the ranks of peasants, land reconcentration, and detrimental national debt burdens.