BESIDES the constitutional issues on the proposed mode for Charter change, the opening up of the economic provisions for amendments would give the go ahead for global land-grabbers and monopolies to further exploit the country, a legislator warned on Sunday.
“With the proposal for the 100-percent ownership of land, media, schools and other strategic industries, transnational and multinational corporations and their local agents are already salivating. One gigantic problem waiting to pounce on us is the issue of foreign-land acquisitions [FLAs], which is a euphemism for international land-grabbing,” said Party-list Rep. Teodoro Casiño of Bayan Muna.
Casiño said that the World Bank’s much anticipated report on FLAs confirms the dismal benefits and adverse social and environmental consequences these types of investments bring to their countries of destination.
“This is the case for many least developed countries, especially in Africa [Mali, Senegal, Tanzania, etc.] whose lands are sold wholesale to rich corporations and countries to the further detriment of their already food insecure and dirt poor local population,” Casiño said.
He also cited Tanzania where Saudi Arabia has bought some 500,000 hectares already, many of which will be for jatropha plantations. Because of this, the legislator said the people there are now urging the government to enact legislation to curb the unhampered selling of their lands to foreigners.
He also added that in Senegal, an Indian-Italian company has bought hectares of arable lands for sunflower seeds instead of their usual produce which is potatoes.
“The farmers have been forced to sell their lands and are now reduced to company laborers. Many of these host countries aid recipients which, in the name of fostering ‘good’ foreign relations, are bartering away their country’s food security and sovereignty,” Casiño said.
In the case of the Philippines, the legislator said that Cha-cha is one route for the legitimization of FLAs, which will further worsen the country’s already dismal agrarian and food- supply conditions.
“They can always say that Africa isn’t the Philippines, but we have the same history and experience of colonial and now neo-colonial relations. If we remove nominal protectionist provisions against foreign- landownership, we open the floodgates for massive FLAs now being done in other similar Southern countries. So we must be wary of anyone proposing such Cha-cha moves now, in the end we may end up not owning our own country,” Casiño said.
Relatedly, House Minority Leader Edcel Lagman said congressmen and senators must go slow in adopting a variation of the constituent assembly to propose amendments to the economic provisions of the 1987 Constitution, “which innovation may be a mongrel bereft of pedigree under the fundamental law.”
“The constitutionality of the proposed variation must be assured even as the necessity of the proposed amendments needs to be ascertained in the absence of a justifiable clamor from foreign investors to liberalize the nationalistic economic provisions which protect Filipino citizens and safeguard the national patrimony,” said Lagman in a statement.
The proposal to amend the Constitution, which has been archived for long owing to disagreements among the legislators on how it should be done, was revived on Thursday with a proadministration senator steering the move.
Sen. Franklin Drilon revisited the proposal by submitting his own position paper to senators and congressmen during the legislative summit, the first between the House of Representatives and the Senate, that was held in a hotel in Mandaluyong City.
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By: Fernan Marasigan
Source: Business Mirror, Oct. 2, 2011
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