In 2008, demonstrations, rallies, long marches abounded as pro-agrarian reform forces waged a campaign to introduce major reforms and have the funding of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) extended.
The landowning elites who have long opposed agrarian reform waged their battle against the program more silently, using their influence (probably their riches) to ensure that the program will not continue. There are also those who rallied for the junking of CARP and called for a "genuine agrarian reform program" but in the end made unwitting allies of the landowners.
Despite winning some battles (the Banasi farmers who marched from Bicol got their lands through a DAR decision) and despite the efforts expended by the farmers themselves, with the long marches and the hunger strike, to highlight and dramatize the critical demand for agrarian reform, a critical round in the war for agrarian reform has been lost.
The fate of CARP, the country’s 20-year old social justice and poverty reduction program, was decided by Congress, in favor of the landed and powerful. A day before the session ended last December, Congress passed Joint Resolution No. 19 (Senate version) and 29 (House version) which ostensibly gave CARP a leash of six (6) months but which removed the “heart and soul” of the agrarian reform program: the compulsory acquisition scheme which has so far given the government power to compel resisting landowners to have their lands subjected under CARP.
