Successful strategies for the implementation of land reform : a peasants’ account from the Philippines
Between 1988 and 2008, the Philippines have been implementing the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) which aimed at redistributing 9 million hectares of agricultural land to landless peasants. Despite the loopholes of the program and the highly unequal social structure which constrain the implementation, this land reform program shows a positively surprising rate of accomplishment of 82% after 20 years. On the more contentious private agricultural land, Borras has argued that the unexpected successful outcome of various land struggles can be explained by the peasants reliance on the bibingka strategy which consists in applying pressure from below and from above to push for land redistribution. His theory however does not go into details about what makes a case more or less contentious, and on how agency and structure interact to influence the outcome of particular land struggles. In this thesis, we first look at how structural features – namely the type of crop produced and the tenurial status of farmers – influence the strength of landowner resistance to key CARP processes of land reform, thus contributing to make a case more or less contentious. Then we analyze the combined influence of the structural setting of the case and of the strategy used by peasants on the implementation outcome of land reform. To address our two main research questions, we present four case studies from the province of Cebu.
Agrarian reform Cebu Bibingka strategy Philippines Land reform Agency