“Chacha isn’t just short for ‘charter change.’ It is also short for ‘chained to imperialists’ and ‘charge into poverty’,” remarked Antonio Flores, chairperson of Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura. “Detached from the workers and farmers it will harm, the bureaucrats railroading chacha reveal their attachment to the profiteering interests of big capitalist plunderers.”
The statement was in reaction to Ako Bicol party-list Rep. Alfredo Garbin Jr., chair of the House Committee on Constitutional Amendments, who revealed that Congress targets the approval of the House Resolution on chacha by next week. According to Flores, in spite of the professed intention of charter-change proponents to fix the constitution, it will only aggravate the country’s deep-seated problems of feudal landlessness, underdevelopment, and low wages.
UMA called the constitutional amendment allowing 100% ownership of land an “attack on the peasantry who makes up the country’s impoverished majority.” Citing statistics from Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, the agri-workers’ group lamented that seven out of 10 farmers remain landless—and instead of granting land to the seven, it will only take land away from the three.
“Hardly a president, Duterte is a salesman peddling our patrimony to transnational agri-businesses like Del Monte, Dole, and Sumifru,” Flores declared. “He has already directed the Department of Agriculture to fast-track crop conversion, facilitating the expansion of corporate plantations to 1.5 million hectares by the end of his term. That’s 1.5 million hectares that could have gone into domestic food production by farmers.”
Studies conducted by UMA reveal that landgrabs force farmers into waged agricultural work with no control over what they farm, and a plantation worker earns an average of P90 to P350. This amount is alarmingly lower than the family living wage of P1,064 a day, and cannot even meet half of UMA’s demand for a national minimum wage of P750. The lowest recorded salary received by an agricultural worker under the Duterte regime was P9 for a full day at a sugar plantation.
“With chacha, food insecurity and slave wages will become the norm,” warned Flores. “Controlled by foreign business interests, our land will yield cash crops instead of food staples. Cash crops will be exported for cheap, while food staples will be imported at exorbitant prices. Barely making minimum wage, even food producers won’t be able to afford food they could otherwise produce on their own.”
UMA blamed the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program for the increased vulnerability of Philippine land to foreign control. They explained that, with chacha, land grabbed through CARP need not pass through the custodianship of big landlords and compradors, and allowing direct control by foreign and transnational corporations. 100% foreign ownership of land is in 100% contradiction with genuine agrarian reform, the only solution to the systemic problem of feudal landlessness.
UMA Pilipinas 