24 June 2009

Farmer-Scientist Group Says No to Public Land Lease to Foreign Corporations

This is in reaction to the article ‘Firm buys 400,000 hectares to plant coconuts.’ We, the Magsasaka at Siyentipiko para sa Pag-unlad ng Agrikultura (MASIPAG Inc) believes that this move of the government (DENR, Phil Coconut Authority and the Office of the President) to lease huge tracts of public land exclusively to private hands (Pacific Bio-Fields Plc, a Japanese holding company based on UK and its local counterpart Bio-Energy North Luzon Inc) at ‘very affordable’ rates for 25 years and renewable for another 25 years is the perfect recipe to another national rice and food crisis, perhaps maybe worse than the Food Crisis early last year.

Food security is tightly intertwined to access to land. In our country where a large portion of the population relies on agriculture as a source of livelihood, land disparity hurts most of our resource-poor farmers and their families. It is even worsened by continued trade liberalization on agriculture, climate change, increased price of farm inputs and government neglect and corruption. Our country only has a very limited area of arable land, but sadly these are being lost through land-use conversion which is very much prevalent. We must realize that the Philippines is a net importer of food since1995 and we are the number one rice importer in the whole world. By leasing lands, we increase our food insecurity and our country becomes at the mercy of the global market as what we have experienced during the height of the Food Crisis.