The farmers of Sumilao — true heroes of our time

Their story is the stuff of legend: a struggle for land that spanned a decade, a legacy unwillingly passed on to their children now grown up and strong enough to join the Long March. It will be told how true People of the Earth bid the nurturing soil of their homes goodbye to traverse the concrete road to the Palace. Instead of standing proud on their ancestral land, its ancient rhythm beating from under their feet, they have trudged through mire, braved the storms and endured the fatigue. Dust swirled round their feet while the alien concrete highways turn from cold under the moon to cruel under the sun. It is unkind to their worn out slippers, their calloused feet: it is heartless to the most important quest of their lives.

The farmers of Sumilao — the Higaonon people — have walked 1,422,319 steps from Bukidnon to Manila. They marched 1,700 kilometres in two months to dramatize their plight. And when they finally reached the gates of the Palace, no one came to greet them. The President was in Europe and her Executive Secretary, Eduardo Ermita, did not think it fitting enough to extend them the courtesy of a meeting. He did not even send anyone of high rank to meet them at the palace gates.

B-A-S-T-O-S!!! It is totally disrespectful to the struggle of all indigenous peoples; it is a slap on the face of every Filipino farmer.

But the Sumilao farmers are made of sterner stuff than anyone from the Palace. They might have wept at the gates, gnashed their teeth in rage and sat wearily on the ground, but they have not given up. Even their sons and daughters — little children when the struggle started but now taking over the cudgels of leadership — stood their ground. And why not? The land lives in their veins, they said. It is life itself. They will do everything to get it back.

Their people are not alien to oppression. Their grandparents have faced it when they were forcibly evicted in the 1940s, while their parents have had to work the land, but could not own it. With the onset of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law, they were finally awarded in 1990 ‘ownership’ of the estate that was rightfully theirs in the first place. But the powers-that-be led by landlord Norberto Quisimbing circumvented the law by re-classifying the land from agricultural to agro-indsutrial. This was approved despite the fact that the land was prime agricultural land situated beside a natural irrigation canal.

The Sumilao farmers have tried all means possible to get back the land of their ancestors: from a hunger strike in 1997, which gained them some light of hope, only to be taken away in 1999 when the Supreme Court denied their motions for reconsideration. In desperation, Robin Lession, one of the farmers in the 1997 hunger strike, took his own life in protest of the Supreme Court decision. It didn’t move the powers-that-be as this was followed by years of mystifying litigation, then the lapse of the five-year development period. Much of the land remained uncultivated and idle, but it’s not really a surprise. Quisimbing never filed for development permits. His promise of an agro-industrial area that would help “…insure food, shelter and lifetime security (for) the greater majority of Sumilao’s 22,000 people” was a sham. In 2002, he sold the land to San Miguel Foods Inc.

San Miguel is now rushing to build hog farms, its vision of development spanning piggeries, poultry farms and processing plants. No farming included.

Twenty-one-old Bajek-jek Merida, daughter of one of the protesters and a farmer herself said it best: “There will be 4,999 pigs living in Sumilao. Are pigs more important than the farmers of Sumilao?”

Indeed, why is their holy land, their ancestral land — prime agricultural land — deemed fit to house pigs, but not the Higaonon people? How could building processing plants be better than letting the rightful owners till their land?

This is the stuff that makes me genuinely weep, my cheeks stinging from salty tears that wouldn’t stop flowing until I get a headache and my eyes feel like lead. This is the kind of stuff that makes me clench my fists in rage and rue the fact that I am in another land. For I wish I could be there to show them I care; to let them know they are not alone in this struggle — even if I probably wouldn’t have been able to survive just the first few days of walking. I would’ve collapsed and would’ve slowed down the march. But if it would’ve meant partaking of a tiny piece of their hardship, even just a bit of their courage and their fierce love for the land, then I wouldn’t have mind suffering from a the heat, calloused feet or pain in my legs. If only to stand in the shadows of real heroes…

In a time when the memory of 12-year old Mariannet Amper is still painfully fresh in our hearts — a sensitive soul who was driven by poverty to commit suicide — government would rather extinguish any light of hope in the hearts of the Higaonon. Courage flows through the hearts of the Sumilao farmers, and yet government have done nothing but to push them down in the quagmire of despair.

Pigs cannot farm, Bajek-jek Merida raged. Would this government rather drive farmers to extinction? Then they deserve to be called a ‘government for pigs and by pigs’.