The Land We Call Home
Rural village in Negros, Philippines.
VOLUME 32, NUMBER 2, JUNE 2010
Twenty-three years ago, when Inter Pares first began its work in the Philippines, most of the island of Negros was devoted to sugar plantations, owned by a handful of extremely wealthy families. Impoverished sugar workers and their families lived, worked, and died in a feudal relationship with land owners unchanged from the Spanish hacenderos of the 1800s.
In the mid-1980s, world prices for sugar collapsed. Production ceased, workers lost their jobs, and people began to starve. Desperate to feed their families, workers mobilized to demand access to plantation land to grow food crops.
In 1988, in response to mobilizations of peasants and agricultural workers throughout the Philippine archipelago, the national government brought in reforms to legally redistribute land from large landholders to small-scale farmers. While thousands of Filipino peasants, small-scale farmer associations, and agricultural workers cooperatives have succeeded in using the reform to acquire land to feed themselves and their children, large landholders continue to use both violence and the courts to maintain their wealth and privilege.
In every place that Inter Pares works, a central issue is the uncertainty people face about their future on the land they call home.
In every place that Inter Pares works, a central issue is the uncertainty people face about their future on the land they call home.
We witness irresponsible mining contaminating the land and water on which rural communities depend in Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Canada’s North, and many parts of Africa. Palm oil, jatropha, and sugar cane destined for biofuels are replacing food production on large swaths of land in Burma, Malaysia, Colombia, Mexico, and the Philippines. Local farmers in coastal areas of India and Bangladesh are being displaced by the aquaculture industry. Small producers in Central America are losing their land to companies exporting flowers to the United States and Canada.
Many of these displaced people migrate into towns and cities. As of 2005, half the world’s population live in urban centres, and one billion people – a sixth of the world’s population – now live in makeshift shanty towns on land they do not own. In these unplanned and often illegal settlements, residents struggle for fair use of land for shelter and for basic services.
In the meantime, the other half of the world’s population continues to live in rural areas. While most rural folk depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, their ability to steward and remain on their lands is increasingly eroded by large-scale corporate land takeovers, or by armed conflict generated by economic interests.
The struggle for land and justice can indeed seem overwhelming. But every day, other realities are being created around the globe. Inter Pares is privileged to work with and support people who, like the Filipino peasants a generation ago, are taking action and working in common cause to resist displacement, to gain access to land and water, to acquire legal rights to the places they call home, and to insist on democratic accountability for the actions of their governments, as well as those of corporations and wealthy elites.
This Bulletin describes some of the activities in which Inter Pares and our counterparts are defending people from displacement from their land and homes, and promoting the policies required to sustain rural livelihoods and urban communities.
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| Reviewed May 21, 2010 |  |
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