Mothers in the rural land power the nation’s fields
Recently, the Lupang Ramos farmers grieved the impact of the successive storms which destroyed their planted corn and string beans.
By Shannia Cabuello
Bulatlat.com
MANILA – The International Day of Rural Women on October 15 marked the start of a weeklong peasant protest against the 53 years of the Marcos-imposed sham land reform law known as Presidential Decree No. 27.
Women farmers, workers, and fisherfolk from Laguna, Bulacan, Tarlac, Rizal, Cavite, and Negros Occidental marched from the Department of Agriculture and camped out in front of the Department of Agrarian Reform to share their struggles and demand recognition for peasant women who feed the nation.
Amihan Women National Chairperson Zenaida Soriano said that women farmers endure unpaid or low wages from family labor and in haciendas as maid, cook, and laundry worker in exchange for staying as tenants.
“Women in rural areas are less decisive than men in communities, least priority in education, less heard when they are victims of abuse and discrimination, and deprived of access to free health care,” Soriano said, highlighting how women struggle twice as much in farms.
Through an hour-long discussion of the enduring struggle of Filipino farmers, 18-hour travel from Negros Occidental to Quezon City, and an 82-page poetry book, peasant women highlighted their vital role as food producers.
Long-term struggle for land ownership
In history, Soriano recounted how Philippine agriculture suffered since the 1500s. She shared how the colonial feudal system is still felt by farmers up to now as they still fight for land ownership, suffer from exploitation of labor, lose from import-dependent policies, and endure abuse from the system that controls the land and natural resources.
“Most farmers do not own the land they work for. Landlords convert farm lands into subdivisions, malls, roads, and airports which only benefits the businessmen,” Soriano said.
According to the Philippine Statistics Authority’s (PSA) 2022 census released only this year, only 4.3 million of the 19.68 million total agricultural population has full ownership or rights over their agricultural land.
Marites Nicart, a vegetable farmer in Lupang Ramos, Cavite, said that their local government unit (LGU) is interested in the land they till. Jenny Bantillo, a sugarcane farmer from the National Federation of Sugar Workers-Negros stressed that big companies and their LGU wants their land to be converted into either malls or solar power plantations.
“The government often calls it urban or post-industrial development. But the collapse of the agricultural industry is not an indication of development, but a reflection of the crisis,” Soriano said.
She stressed that as the farmers get old, they want their children to finish education so that they can work abroad or move to the city, hoping that they will escape the poverty in farm life. “It is not that they do not want to be farmers anymore. They just know it’s hard because they do not own the land.”
Not just farm helpers
Aside from landlessness, peasant women are often treated poorly. Oriang Women’s Movement President Flora Asiddao-Santos said that while rural women are responsible for the family’s food security, water, and fuel, they eat last and the least within their households.
As a mother in a rural area, Bantillo starts her day at 4 a.m. She will first cook meals for her husband and children, then watch them eat. Without even tasting the meal she prepared, she will start tending to the farm, go home at 11 am to prepare lunch, and return to the field at 1 pm until dusk. As the sun rises, as it burns her skin at noon, and until the sun has set, food for her loved ones is her priority.
“Why do we need to travel this long just to be heard?” Bantillo asked.
She endured a long-distance commute from Negros Occidental to Quezon City in the hopes of having a dialogue and consultation with the Agrarian Reform Secretary Conrado Estrella III about their years of fight for land ownership and low wage labor for women in their community.
“In our country, men do all the labor to provide for their families. But as a wife and a mother on a farm, we do more to lessen our husband’s labor. We cook for our family, we also endure long hours of work under the sun, we weed the cane field, then we budget at least P82 salary for our family of five,” Bantillo said, stressing that it is the women in sugarcane fields who often use their hands while their husbands use the machines during work.
During the off-milling season when work in sugar fields and mills stop, she said that they receive government assistance of P500 which they will maximize for a week. She stressed that it is often not enough, resulting in her borrowing money from her siblings just to support her eldest in college.
Despite the hardships, Bantillo said that they cannot abandon farming as it brings food to the country’s table. “If they cannot give us lands we can use, support us so we can use our backyards. Supply us seeds so we can plant crops and vegetables we can eat and sell.”
Poetry as resistance
As their struggles continue, mothers in the farm find their unique ways to strengthen their demands. Nicart told her story through a book of 40 poems about her experiences as a wife, a mother, and a vegetable farmer in Lupang Ramos.
When she performed her first poem titled Lupang Ramos during a Christmas party in 2017, she saw how her colleagues who previously worked for 24 hours in the field daily felt about her words. Since then, writing about their everyday life became her break in farm work.
In 2019, Gantala Press visited their community to document the decade-long struggle in protecting the 372-hectare agricultural land from developers and government agencies in Dasmarinas, Cavite. After Nicart recited a poem, Gantala’s publisher Faye Cura motivated her to publish a compilation of her written works as she sees the strength of her narrative.
Her poetry book Nanay Magsasaka is the first published poetry book written by a peasant woman in the history of Philippine literature.
“These poems are short and easy to understand, but the experiences and calls of Lupang Ramos are emphasized. I hope to encourage peasant women to be strong, to unite, and to continue fighting for the rights to their land,” she said.
Recently, the Lupang Ramos farmers grieved the impact of the successive storms which destroyed their planted corn and string beans. According to Nicart, only the rainfall serves as the irrigation in their land, but it also destroys the soil when it rains hard, limiting their planting season.
Nicart expressed hope that the government would not be selective when giving subsidies and that it would completely distribute the land they have been demanding for decades now. “We will continue planting for as long as we have the seeds and the land. Despite our limitations in strength, I hope they stop belittling us peasant women.”
Through their known different ways, mothers of the farm will do everything they can to assert their rights. “The role and duty of women in rural lands is significant. It is time that we are seen as a strong force that will change the depressive condition of our communities,” Soriano said. (RTS, DAA)
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