Next Luisita agenda: price per hectare

Tomorrow is the big day. The Supreme Court will decide en banc if the joint Comelec-Department of Justice investigation panel is legal or not. On the ruling will rest whether Gloria Macapagal Arroyo will stay arrested or freed.

The Comelec had cited R.A. 9369 in probing with the DOJ purported cheating in the 2007 balloting. After three months of evidence gathering it filed against Arroyo the other week a non-bailable charge of electoral sabotage. Under the law, a public official who alters poll results by causing the tampering of 10,000 or more election returns shall be imprisoned for life. Arroyo allegedly committed the offense during the canvassing of senatorial votes at the Philippine International Convention Center in Pasay City. On that basis the Pasay regional trial court had her arrested and detained at the St. Luke’s Hospital in Taguig City. Subsequently Arroyo’s doctors swore that she is well enough to be discharged, so the court presently is determining if she should be jailed at home or the police station.

Arroyo’s lawyers naturally want her kept out of jail, and even traveling abroad for supposed medical treatment. They say it was wrong for a constitutional office like the Comelec to depend on a mere executive agency like the DOJ for its investigations. In doing so, the Comelec allegedly lost its independence. If the lawyers get a favorable ruling from the SC, then all the Comelec-DOJ panel’s acts would be deemed moot. The electoral sabotage rap would be voided, and Arroyo would be free to go.

The lawyers can bolster their petition by claiming that the electoral sabotage proviso itself is unconstitutional. At least one legal expert says it violates the equal protection clause by not specifying penalties for manipulators of, say, 5,000 electoral returns or less that also alter the voting result. Public opinion, meanwhile, is against Arroyo. Radio-television polls the past two weeks had eight of ten listeners-viewers clamoring for Arroyo’s detention and trial. Not only the election rap is being talked about, but also plunder and graft.

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Any day now the SC will release its ruling on Hacienda Luisita. From confirmed press leaks, the verdict is unanimous, 14-0, for President Noynoy Aquino’s Cojuangco family to redistribute the 5,000-hectare sugar estate to 6,296 farm workers. The stock-distribution option is invalid. What next?

Agrarian Reform Sec. Virgilio delos Reyes points to two tasks, one immediate, the other long-term. They will ask the court to determine the just compensation for the Cojuangcos. Then, they must ensure full government support so that the new estate owners will succeed in their endeavor.

Three factors come into play in valuating the land for agrarian reform. First is the capitalized net income over 20 years; that is, what the landlord was earning from it in the past and could earn in future. Second is the tax declaration, or the legal assessment of the estate’s worth and hence the tax that the landlord has been paying. Last is comparable sale, that is, the amount by which proximate holdings recently have been sold.

The last could prove controversial. For it would depend on the point of reckoning. Most of the justices say it should be 1989, when the Cojuangcos initiated the now-nullified SDO. If so, the estate would be worth about P50,000 per hectare, the highest going rate for sugar lands at the time.

Some justices suggest 2004, when the government purchased 80 hectares of Hacienda Luisita that came under the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway. The acquisition of the right of way was roughly P1 million per hectare.

The contentious issue is obvious. The government would have to decide whether to recompense the Cojuangcos a total of P250 million under the 1989 market price, or P5 billion under the 2004 rate. However the court rules, delos Reyes assures transparent proceedings.

Side issues complicate the work. One, the SC wants the Cojuangcos to turn over to the farm beneficiaries the P1.3 billion they had made from selling 580 hectares of the hacienda (to the SCTEX, an industrial park, and an upscale subdivision. Two, what to do with portions that the Cojuangcos had allocated long ago for employee housing? Three, how to repay P2 billion that San Miguel Corp. had advanced to the hacienda?

In the long-term, the government must help the 6,296 beneficiaries and 4,000-plus other farmhands run the estate. The agrarian reform law requires individualized land titling. Beneficiaries may not sell the land within ten years; leasing would require consent of the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council. The new landholders cannot be forced to collectivize; they unanimously may opt to operate as a sugar estate, or in smaller groups shift to other crops. Rice and most vegetables would need more irrigation; meaning the government must build infrastructures.

Other factors to consider: repayment by beneficiaries of the 8,000-square-meter parcels to be allotted to each; real estate taxes; working capital; right of way for new roads; purchases of fertilizers, pesticides and farm equipment; market development and links.

Delos Reyes says a million more hectares need to be redistributed, mostly in the 20 richest agricultural provinces. A third of these consist not of haciendas but landholdings of roughly ten hectares each.

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