Justice for Peasants
As we celebrate Peasant’s Month, we acknowledge those who consistently work hard to keep the country running, upholding the importance of subsidization in our community, whose efforts provide our daily necessities. Let us also shine a light towards those in power as we shall never forget how they have persistently failed to give the peasants the justice they deserve.
Farmers are our country’s backbone. This is knowledge constantly preached, yet no coherent action has been done to show or provide them the support they deserve. They work hard for hours under the sun, constantly battling with circumstances they cannot control: weather conditions, seasonal offspring, unjust treatments, market value alterations, and now, the COVID-19 pandemic.
The meteorology factor is inevitable. However, higher-ups can provide proper treatments, just economic systems, and efficient subsidies amidst the pandemic. However, nobody has delivered such provisions.
Starting with the main social issue today, the COVID-19 pandemic was not handled well by the government, as evident in the persisting uproar of cases in the country. To add to this, the agricultural sector was one of the hardest hit by the pandemic. According to statistics, the country incurred over PHP 4.6 billion in agricultural damage from typhoons and other events in the last quarter of 2020. As the pandemic is starting to phase out due to the arrival of vaccines, restoring the agricultural sector to its peak should be a priority for the government. Consequently, it should also try to listen and provide the just requests of the leading members in the agricultural sector, the farmers, to acknowledge the supposed elephants in the room that they have endured in farming for years.
Moreover, farmers have voiced out their demand to own land for some time now. The fact that the price of rice and other certain crops in the market has dropped and has left the farmers at the mercy of landlords and traders is sickening. Farmers do not receive the proper compensation from such selfish characters. If they owned their land, it would have been a different story; yet they do not. Rather than being given what they require and need, farmers are frequently disregarded and, in worse cases, killed since President Duterte took power in July 2016, over 250 documented killings of peasants (such as farmworkers and fisherfolks) related to land dispute cases and agrarian reform advocacy.
The masses, the 99%, have voiced out their concerns, yet those in power, the 1%, choose to ignore it. They choose to go deaf to the screams of the peasant. We must not allow such injustice to continue. Justice for the peasants is justice for the Filipinos.
