ESCALANTE – For more than 20 years farmer Eugenio Alpar has been fighting for the right to own the land he tills in Negros .

Now that his dream is in sight the 72-year-old activist for land reform says he may be too old to do anything with it.

In 1988 the Philippine government introduced an agrarian land reform program in which it promised to lift millions out of poverty and give farm workers the right to own land.

Landowners were required to break up their holdings and sell the land to poor farm workers at prices determined by the government.

Alpar has battled personal problems, hunger and attacks by hired armed thugs for what he considers is the right of every rural Filipino -- to own the land he tills.

"I realized a long time ago that even if you have the right to something, it does not guarantee you will get it," he said. "Chances are, you always have to fight for it."

Gazing out across sugarcane fields that would be turned over to him after harvest, he recalls the day back in September 1985 when poor sugar plantation workers were gunned down by troops and police in the town of Escalante on Negros who were protesting for better conditions and land.

On the day now known as "Bloody Thursday," thousands of poor farm workers and fishermen packed into the town's central plaza.

"We had just finished lunch when the military threw tear gas at us," he said. "We threw it back and the shooting began.

"The hail of gunfire caught many of those who ran. Twenty died and 30 were wounded. We even found bodies in the cane fields. I was not able to sleep for a long time after that.

"All we wanted were solutions to our problems," he said.

But 20 years after the landmark agrarian land reform program was introduced, grinding rural poverty still endures and millions of farm workers are still poor, a study funded by the German government found recently.

Some 6.95 million hectares of farmland have been handed over to 4.8 million farm workers since the program was launched.

The new landowners found they lacked the resources to succeed, said the study funded by GTZ, an arm of the German Ministry of Development Cooperation.

"The agricultural sector, as a whole, is still in a state of distress. At the macro level, the social and economic conditions in the rural communities are not any better than they were 10 years ago," the study said.

The rural sector accounts for 17.4 percent of Philippine economic output and employs some 6.3 million people, or 18.7 percent of the total workforce, according to government figures. Most of the country's poor live in rural areas.

Agrarian Reform Secretary Nasser Pangandaman said agrarian reform "in general was beneficial," but agreed that recipients need more help.

Manila has yet to acquire and distribute all the targeted farmland, much of which is held by politically connected landed families.

The study urged the government to focus its resources on "compulsory acquisition" of some 1.265 million hectares held by landowners who have resisted the P271-billion ($6.56-billion) program through legal maneuvers or by rejecting the price offered by the government for their land.

For farmers like Alpar, however, the wait has already been too long.*AFP

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