“The Filipino Peasant in the Modern World: Tradition, Change, and Resilience.” Conducted by Dr. Eduardo C. Tadem of the Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman, this study is focused on the state of peasants in the Philippines from 1950 up to present. The researcher examined the ability of the peasants to retain their traditional norms and practices amidst the changes brought by external communities and modernization in general. Dr. Tadem began with the assumption that in rural areas of developing countries, “a distinct and internally resilient peasant society persists based on smallholder productive activities with its own social, economic, political, and cultural characteristics.” He specifically defined peasants as those who are small and lower middle-sized cultivators, rural wage workers or rural semi-proletariat with either small farm holdings or kinship ties with small scale rural production units.
Three closely located farming villages from Central Luzon, Philippines were analyzed in the study. These are San Vicente and Sto. Niño in Bamban, Tarlac, and Calumpang in Mabalacat, Pampanga. The area covers 5,612 hectares of rolling hills and mountains. Its landmarks include the Mount Pinatubo in the southwest, and in the southeast, the American military complex in Clark Air Base, which was forced to close down in 1992. The peasant communities present in these areas are subsistence-oriented and live on small farms utilizing simple technologies with minimum market connections. They uphold peasant ethics or their traditional norms and practices which include village solidarity, concepts of land and property rights, and informal land transactions.
Dr. Tadem studied the history of the three villages thoroughly to understand their survival in the midst of and adaptation to the waves of modernization that reached their communities. He noted significant external interventions that the communities have surmounted starting from the 1950s. Some of these are rural development programs that promised prosperity, sugar capitalists who offered market profits, the insurgence of rebellious groups such as the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army (CPP-NPA) and the installation of U.S. military bases that had legal title over the area. These interventions resulted in social unrest due to evident oppression of peasant communities. During the implementation of the integrated rural development (IRD) program in 1979, the government deprived the peasant communities of their landholdings with promises of rapid economic development in their area. However, peasants were only hired as laborers in their own farms and were paid with low wages. Another major intervention is the presence of the guerilla forces, the CPP-NPA. At the height of the rebel movement from 1968 to 1979, attitudes of the villagers varied from those who embraced the communist group’s ideologies to those who believed differently, while others decided to be neutral. However, it was certain that the peasants were able to develop the ability to resist imposition and injustice especially from external influences, thus significantly contributing to the political awareness of the peasant community. Today, external interventions in the three villages are continuing through the Clark special economic zone, the replacement of the military complex which was forced to close down in 1992. The special economic zone was established for potential economic opportunities in agribusiness. However, this intention was proven to be idealistic, thus, opening the area to interested commercial investors.
These interactions with the non-peasant society, though oppressive, have opened the peasant villages to modernity. They were introduced to new agricultural technologies, exposed to a number of market contacts, and separated from their families due to migration from the rural to the urban area. Despite these interventions, the peasant class in the three villages still persisted. Based on the research, “it was the farming sector that served to keep the collective rural identity of the community intact and resilient in the face of the various interventions and adversities that descended on the villages.” The cultural norms and practices retained include the traditional concepts of land and property, cooperative forms of labor and the importance of family and kinship ties.
The research states that statistical data from government surveys indicate continuous decrease in the peasant population because of wage-earning jobs made available to them. These figures, however, do not reflect that the majority of the wage-earners were given unstable and under compensated positions also in the field of agriculture. The workers then return to peasant farming and do it alternately with their wage work in order to gain additional income. In 2005, it was also found out that forty-two percent (42%) of the 750,000 new jobs created in the Philippines were in the form of unpaid family labor in agriculture (Habito, 2006). The aforementioned points show that the peasant society has remained despite modernization and other developments. Therefore, according to Dr. Tadem, the study suggests “the need for policymakers to increase attention to the agricultural sector and the small farmer as important components of economic development.” Dr. Eduardo Tadem recommends that similar studies be made in other villages or in other countries. He hopes likewise that this study has encouraged other scholarly interest in the peasantry especially from younger academics.
Eduardo Climaco Tadem is an Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. He holds a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore. He has researched and published extensively on agrarian reform and rural development, industry studies, regional development, rural unrest and social movements, the political economy of foreign aid, Philippine-Japan relations, conflicts over natural resources, international labor migration, foreign investments, and contemporary politics. He has also participated in numerous international conferences in various Asian, European, North American and Latin American countries and served as chairperson or board member of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in social development and research work.
By MMRParreño
References:
1. Tadem, Eduardo C. (2007). The Filipino Peasant in the Modern World: Tradition, Change, and Resilience. Updated version of the Ph.D. dissertation submitted to the Southeast Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore. Funded by the Office of the Chancellor, in collaboration with the Office of the Vice-Chancellor for Research and Development, of the University of the Philippines Diliman through the Ph.D. Incentive Award. Published in the forthcoming issue of the Social Science Diliman, Volume 4.
2. Habito, Cielito F. (2006, March 20). Scorecard on Jobs, Prices. Philippine Daily Inquirer.
