First job for Lito Atienza
As environment secretary, one of Lito Atienza’s first job will be to remove possible charges of members of his family violating local ordinances that have to do with the environment.
As part of a group of media people invited over the weekend to Boracay, I was simply amazed at the huge numbers of foreign and local tourists enjoying the powder-fine beaches of the place. And they’re not the backpack-type of tourists; most of them were Europeans and Koreans who came by the planeload, and businessmen and families from
We walked the length of the beach at high tide, but could not reach the far end as a part of a hotel facility, True Homes, jutted out towards the sea, thereby blocking our way. We had to go up the alley if we were to continue our walk. The facility, we were told by long-time residents, violated a local ordinance which allows tourist structures to be built no more than 25 meters away from the “vegetative” line — meaning the last line on which vegetation, in the case of Boracay, coconut trees, stand. The same ordinance prohibits the putting up of concrete stairs or walls within the vegetative line.
We were told that one of the owners of True Homes is a son of Secretary Atienza. If the secretary does not know that, he should check it out, or else environmentalists who are opposed to his appointment can block his confirmation.
In fact, Boracay officials should tear down all illegal structures by the beach, not just those of True Homes.
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It’s almost 20 years since the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) was instituted in 1987 and passed into law as Republic Act 6657 the following year. Legislators are now urged to extend the program again after its first extension 10 years ago to cover the more contentious aspect of acquiring and distributing the plantations and other big landholdings.
The 10-year extension is about to end, but the job is far from over not only with respect to the contentious aspect of CARP but also because the implementors overlooked the ecological considerations in its implementation.
It’s only now after the recent Albay and Guinsaugon, Leyte disasters that buried agrarian reform communities including the Department of Agrarian Reform office in Albay, and with the increasing threat of global warming and climate change, that the ecological premise for CARP is being revisited:
“The agrarian reform program is founded on the right of farmers and regular farmworkers who are landless, to own directly or collectively the lands they till or, in the case of other farmworkers, to receive a just share of the fruits thereof. To this end, the State shall encourage and undertake the just distribution of all agricultural lands, subject to the priorities and retention limits set forth in this Act, having taken into account ecological, developmental, and equity considerations, and subject to the payment of just compensation….”
DAR is now introducing the concept of Ecological Agrarian Reform Centers or E-ARCs beyond 2008 to help the farmers in the agrarian reform communities become self-sustaining, whether or not CARP will be extended after June 2008.
E-ARCS will introduce, establish, and activate the ARC- and barangay-based
This is directed to enhance the productivity of rice, vegetable, livestock, and poultry farms, develop other sources of livelihood in close coordination with the ARC/barangay (including non-ARC) households, and prevent the further deterioration of the land resource base as well as enhance its condition for increased cultivation over the long term.
Degraded farm lands will be rehabilitated after massive and long-time use of chemical inputs, to enhance and sustain the ecological condition of farm areas for increased productivity and incomes and improved quality of community life.
E-ARCs will also promote and expand organic farming using farmer- and household- and community- produced inputs for safe, toxic-free food and other produce. Non-importation of chemical fertilizer, pesticide, and herbicide will result in savings for the government. With the use of locally available resources in the households and community to produce compost or organic fertilizer, food production can be spread out to more areas — thus helping mitigate the immediate problem of hunger and address the longer-term need for an ecologically sound development of the national economy.
For increased incomes apart from farming, other livelihood and entrepreneurship opportunities will be introduced, based on ecological waste and resource management practice through the use of community-tested and environment-friendly technologies and recycling of other excess resources.
The bonus here is reduced extraction of dwindling natural resources for industries, for example, with the use of shredded plastics and styrofor in place of sand for construction materials or of other components for decorative tiles, though this is just a remedial measure while the lobby to phase out plastics has not yet succeeded.
The Ecology Center is also meant to close garbage dumpsites or landfills which are now illegal, because these are environment blights that cause pollution of land and water resources, destruction of produce, spread of diseases among the human, animal, and plant populations — greatly upsetting the ecological balance in the ARCs and the rest of the countryside, and considerably contributing to global warming.
The ecological aspect of CARP is what legislators — many, if not most of whom, are either big landowners themselves or descendants of the landed class — should seriously look into as a significant factor in pursuing the program.
For it is only logical to attribute much of the causes of inequity, poverty, hunger, and restiveness in the countryside, which the program is meant to address, to the very same reasons that have brought about the global environmental crisis.
Carrying out an honest-to-goodness ecological agrarian reform program would make it yet the “most fundamental and far-reaching program of government” as it had been described 20 years ago.
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