This Peasant Month, we stand in unwavering solidarity with the Filipino peasants – the 75% of the population and the heart and soul of our nation’s land and future. As a faith community rooted in the struggle for justice and liberation, the Christians for National Liberation affirms that the call for genuine land reform is not merely an economic issue but a sacred fight against imperialism, bureaucrat capitalism, and feudalism.
For too long, Filipino peasants have been enslaved by feudal landlords, multinational corporations, and a system that prioritizes profit over people, perpetuating landlessness, poverty, and hunger. This is feudalism today: land monopoly by a handful of clans, usury, exorbitant rent, land grabbing, militarization of communities, and the violent suppression of peasant struggles, aggravated by calamities. Fake land reform programs have been paraded by every regime, but all have failed. They preserve landlord power while abandoning peasants to destitution. Marcos Jr’s puppet administration is no different and even worse.
The Marcos Administration is bulldozing vast farmlands, such as in Central Luzon, for infrastructures and real estate projects– disregarding ecological destruction, livelihood devastation, and food insecurity,[1] while utilizing phony land distribution programs as smokescreen for the massive land-use conversions, land acquisitions, and displacement of farmers. This is seen in the dole-out of meaningless Certificates of Condonation and Release of Mortgage (COCROMs) to farmers under the bogus Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) and the New Agrarian Emancipation Act (NAEA), that are touted by the administration and reformists as their greatest gift for farmers as if these are genuine land reform programs.
These injustices are compounded by imperialist forces that impose neoliberal policies, keeping our agricultural system largely backward and has made feudalism its handmaid and our country its resource pit. The SPLIT (Support to Parcelization of Land for Individual Titling) program, funded by the World Bank like CARP and NAEA, exposed the role of bureaucracy and big landlords in legitimizing land-grabbing through legal schemes and loopholes. Bureaucrat capitalists built farm-to-market roads ₱10.3 billion worth of over-pricing from 2023 to 2024, that led straight to their pockets. Meanwhile, the average farmgate price of palay today has reached an all-time low at ₱15.60, a 30.5 percent drop from last year’s ₱22.43 per kilo. It exposes the inutile and sham government policies that leave farmers at the mercy of so-called market forces, middlemen, and corporate greed. The reactionary government of the Philippines is an enemy of the peasants as it connives with the US imperialist and agro-businesses that relentlessly convert land use from self-sustaining food production to serving corporate demand for profit. These are bore ultimately by the sector of peasants, farmers, farm workers, indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, rural women, rural youth and children.
In most rural regions, farmers flee not just due to land grabbing, but also due to militarization. Rural farmers are forced to endure inhumane and barbaric acts of state forces against the peasant masses. Day and night, farm communities are heavily militarized by the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Communities are hamletted, with curfews imposed. They are battered with aerial bombings, strafing, and indiscriminate firing, where farmers and their families are often treated as “collateral damage”, and their murders alarmingly disguised as fake “encounters”. These are clear violations of human rights and the International Humanitarian Law that statistically happen to farmers and their communities daily, particularly in Southern Tagalog, Eastern Visayas, and Negros Island.
We invoke the spirit of the Jubilee, a biblical call to “give their land back” (Leviticus 25) to those who have been dispossessed, a divine mandate for restoration, freedom, and healing. The land is a sacred gift from God, entrusted not to be hoarded or exploited, but to be shared justly among all who labor on it. The call to Jubilee demands the cancellation of oppressive debts and the return of land to the tillers—those who nurture it with their sweat and lives. However, the US imperialist, bureaucrat capitalists, and big landlords have no concern to solve the problem of feudalism, as it is according to their class interest that the Philippines to remain backward, agrarian, and non-industrialized in order for them to plunder the rich and agricultural resources of the country. Therefore, we are ought to dismantle the monopoly of lands in the hands of the few–big landlords, big comprador bourgeoisie and bureaucrat capitalists, by supporting the agrarian revolution in the countryside, as one of the most crucial components of the national democratic revolution with a socialist perspective.
The Christian Jubilee call is made alive by the agrarian revolution. For the past decades, the revolutionary movement has carried out the minimum land reform program in ever-expanding areas in the countryside. It involves the reduction of land rent and abolition of usury, and the setting up of mutual aid and labor exchange systems among the peasantry. The persevering people’s revolution has also made it possible for land, in some areas, to be confiscated from despotic landlords and land-grabbers and brought back to the peasants, for unjust debts to be condoned, for farmers’ cooperatives to be organized, and for appropriate technologies to be introduced to the masses. Through these efforts, the wages of farm workers and farm gate prices of agricultural products have been improved, crop yield for the community’s subsistence have been developed, bringing substantial development in the livelihood of the Filipino peasantry. These are now being implemented even in areas where the fangs of feudalism are especially sharp, such as in Southern Tagalog, Bicol and Eastern Visayas
Peasant Month 2025 is not a celebration of suffering—it is a declaration of revolutionary struggle, one that has already been proven effective . The land belongs to those who till it. The liberation of the peasants is the liberation of the entire nation. Thus, it is imperative for revolutionary Christians to join the New People’s Army, mainly fortified by peasants, and to unite with the other democratic sectors and in conducting anti-feudal mass struggles, carrying out the agrarian revolution in the countryside. CNL members have also long supported the agrarian revolution by preparing guerrilla zones, bringing material support and introducing relevant agricultural technologies, and in resisting the neoliberal and fascist offensives of the US-Marcos II regime. As Christians for National Liberation, we proclaim that this struggle is deeply moral and spiritual. Christ declared: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me… he has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18). The gospel of liberation demands that we stand with the peasants in their fight for justice.
Down with feudalism!
Down with imperialism and bureaucrat capitalism!
Long live the peasantry!
Long live the National Democratic Revolution!
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[1] Marcos Jr.’s Central Luzon Link Expressway (CLLex) removed at least 200 hectare of rice lands disrupting irrigation networks and increasing flood risks in Nueva Ecija; and the North Luzon East Expressway (NLEE) will cut through 470 hectares of productive rice land that would fragmenting farmlands and displacing farmers. In Hacienda Luisita, over 500 hectares of land in Tarlac are slated to be converted into a “green energy zone” by Aboitiz Infracapital., despite unresolved agrarian reform issues and Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling mandating land distribution to farmers.
