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The peasant’s month for the militant Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) was observed in a nationwide coordinated “Lakbayan” to draw focus on and raise issues that beset the predominantly peasant population of the country. The annual march or lakbayan highlights the condition of the Filipino farmers and their demands for the implementation of a genuine agrarian reform program, the need for government support to improve productivity, health, education and other public services.

It has been some twenty years since the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law has been passed and to this day it has not brought any significant improvement to the living conditions of the peasants in the country and instead has contributed to the worsening problem of landlessness. And therefore also threatens the country’s food security.

Agriculture has also been the traditional and main source of livelihood for the majority of indigenous peoples in the Cordillera region – nurturing and farming the ancestral land and domain. Protection of their communal watershed, pastures, forests and rivers is very much tied to their culture, and everyday life because it assured and sustained the bountiful harvests from their cultivated farms.

Farmers in these mountains raise similar issues as the country’s peasants that greatly affect their ancestral farms and domains. Without the needed forest cover and unprotected mountain slopes, the food security of the northern Luzon regions is greatly reduced and continues to be threatened by natural calamities like the recent typhoons aggravated by the phenomenon of climate change. On top of it, farmers suffer from devastating state-supported development projects that aggressively take away and destroy the natural productivity of the ancestral domain in favor of corporate mining, corporate farms, energy sources for private power companies, etc.

The annual nationally coordinated Lakbayan has not only given the people a venue to air their problems, and popularize their proposed solutions to sustain food security for the country’s generations. It has also served as an important venue and significant role of building their ranks, renewing friendships, strengthening solidarity ties, assuring the rightness of the peoples’ development programs, and expanding the world view, etc.

As the farmer’s and peasant organizations were preparing for their recent Lakbayan, people in the United States and other north countries were staging “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) actions. The “Occupy Wall Street” is a fast growing protest movement against economic inequality and the power of US financial institutions, it is against imperialism. The group said that, “at a minimum, OWS raises the basic question of fairness and equality, and the fact that there are no such principles under the current state of the US economic system”.

This October, peasants and the farmers organizations in the Lakbayan recognized an ally across the ocean, and expressed their solidarity to the growing ranks of a world wide campaign against imperialism. # nordis.net