Land conflicts in this country are about political power.
Increasingly, however, talking about political power and land conflicts nowadays is not in ways most of us generally understand.
In the recent past, land conflicts largely meant control by a few large tracts of agricultural lands.
Not for anything our entrenched feudalistic cacique democracy is still replete with hot-button land control issues involving hacienderos and hacienda agriculture since land is the basis for their wealth, patronage, and political power.
But in recent years, politicized conflicts over the gobbling of agricultural lands "is now the potential of agricultural land for urban-industrial uses that motivates the will to control it rather than the need to dominate the agricultural economy and workforce."
Struggles over land for converting these into industrial parks, leisure facilities like golf courses, and, most significantly in recent debates, residential subdivisions, then is the modernized meaning of political power over the land.
In a sense, therefore, the highly-publicized tiff between Senators Raffy Tulfo and Cynthia Villar over the conversion of farmlands into residential or commercial areas during plenary deliberations on the 2023 budget of the Department of Agriculture is but the continuing redefinition of what the political struggles over land now means.
Undoubtedly, Mr. Tulfo's point in asking about the efforts of the Department of Agriculture to address the alarming decreasing number of farmlands is a valid political concern.
Neither is Mr. Tulfo the first senior official to raise it, emphasizing the point the controversial issue remains unresolved up to the present day.
In 2019, for instance, former Senator Kiko Pangilinan sought to address unbridled land conversions by requiring additional certifications before developers can be granted a conversion permit.
Mr. Pangilinan then said he raised the alarm since "Luzon suffers most from massive land conversion, making up 80.6 percent of the entire country's approved land conversions" while Visayas and Mindanao stood at 7.8 and 11.6 percent.
Debating Mr. Tulfo, Ms. Villar, whose family is invested heavily in the subdivision business, insisted she and her family do not buy agricultural lands in the provinces.
"Nobody will buy houses in agricultural lands. We only buy in cities and capital towns because… It's very hard to resell houses (near agricultural lands). Not (so) in cities or capital towns. So we limit ourselves [to] cities and capital towns," she said.
Ms. Villar's defense does sound logically plausible.
But only if one doesn't know any better about the urban-rural divide and the way it significantly changed throughout the years.
In fact, we can only understand Ms. Villar's defense if we assume there is still a distinct urban-rural divide.
Certainly, of course, we can still see distinct urban-rural economic relations operating in many parts of the country.
Yet the question of whether or not the traditional distinct spatial divide between the "rural" and the "urban" still exists has been hotly contested for more than two decades now.
Now such blurring of boundaries between urban and rural is intensely political.
Political since agricultural land conversions trigger emotive issues relating to national food security, the priority given to industrial versus agricultural development, and the rights of tenant farmers and agricultural laborers.
Land conversion issues, in essence, are where the tensions of the country's different developmental priorities are played out.
Here, being played out are some complex questions as: Do we prioritize increased food production over housing needs? Or increasing food production now more crucial than industrialized development and more jobs?
All these hot-button political questions need astute political resolutions and maneuvers.
Ironically, there is no lack of government initiatives or frameworks to address such crucial but contentious political questions.
In fact, at the national level, there are so many specific policy frameworks and specific laws regulating agricultural land conversion processes that don't sacrifice industrial development.
Unfortunately, however, these frameworks and laws are frequently and easily circumvented and undermined, to our constant irritable consternation.
***
Email: nevqjr@yahoo.com.ph
