The Philippines aims to create a hundred new cities in the next 25 years. To achieve this, the government seeks to evict thousands of farming communities from lands they obtained through agrarian reform, a land redistribution program touted as one of the largest in human history. Six million hectares were redistributed among three million people, but the goal was never to reverse inequalities; rather, it aimed to eradicate communism. Today, farmers who oppose the government’s “national development” agenda, alongside the country’s wealthiest families, face threats, violence, and criminalization. The objective is to strip them of their lands to create commercial zones and airports for the new cities.

Text: Daniel Wizenberg. This report was originally published in the Spanish magazine Kamchatka.
Photographs: Bruna Casas / RUIDO Photo

For 13 years now, at each end of this town of 2,500 inhabitants, there has been a surveillance post where individuals armed with blue military uniforms bearing the logo of a security company called Privilegio control everything that happens in the 120 houses, farms, school, church, and basketball court that are scattered along a 3-kilometer paved road.

Sumalo, humid and hot, is in a tropical valley where you breathe the pure air scarce in Manila, the capital, two hours away, where 14,800 people live per square kilometer. Next to each surveillance post, a metal sign says, “Slow down, you are entering private property of River Forest Development Corporation.”

Mike, a cheerful 49-year-old man with dyed red hair and a white tank top, says he refused to sign a “memorandum of understanding” brought to him by the blue guards from River Forest. The document implied accepting minimal compensation in money and the promise of relocation to another community, or eviction without further notice. Mike chose to stay in his house. The next morning, when he went to check on his four cows, one had been killed.

Mike chose to stay at home. The next morning when he went to check on his four cows, one had been killed.

Loida, 40 years old, with big eyes and a tired look, says, while preparing a rice cake with her friend Ani, that the guards killed her dogs, that children no longer play in the street for fear of the men in blue, and that one day the guards aimed a gun at her sister, accusing her of encouraging people not to sign the memorandum. They demanded that she inform the rest of her family about the extent of the threat. Loida is sure that signing that memorandum does not prevent eviction: “at most, it puts you at the end of the list of future evictees.”

Rose, 42 years old, recounts that in early September 2022, when she opened the door of her house to go to the farm a kilometer away where she has mango trees, pineapple plants, and potatoes, she discovered a giant X painted on the floor of her entrance: “At night I heard a noise; a neighbor saw them, it was the men in blue.” On her way to the farm, Rose discovered there were more. The Litton family corporation sent its private police to mark another 52 homes with Xs. It was the sign of the residence of all those who had refused to accept the corporation’s offer.

The grim warning contained in those Xs would materialize a month later, when a brigade of burly men arrived in trucks and a bulldozer. With sledgehammers, they demolished the marked houses. People managed to get out in time, but all their belongings were left inside. “It’s the Litton family,” says Rose, the owners of River Forest, as her voice starts to break. “But we don’t know who they are, no one here knows them, but they act as if all of this were their great estate,” she says, sobbing.

By the end of that day, the guards fenced off each demolished plot with barbed wire and hung a sign like the one at the entrance to the village on each fence: “No trespassing. Property with title. River Forest Development Corporation.”

Sumalo today looks like a bombed-out town: the rubble is still there.

“Es la familia Litton”, dice Rose, “los dueños de la River Forest, aquí nadie los conoce pero se manejan como si todo esto fuera su gran finca”.

The families of Sumalo live in fear of being evicted at any moment. © Bruna Casas / RUIDO Photo

The houses were not mere shacks but the realization of the peasants’ dreams built with the work of their plots, the little houses in Sumalo didn’t have running water or sewage, but they were cool, spacious, with air conditioning, internet, cable TV, and a kitchen. With no need to pay rent, mortgage, or buy food: each one planted on their farm and sometimes cooperatively organized to sow and harvest.

Some of those evicted left the village, but most were taken in by other neighbors and now live in their backyards in improvised one-room apartments with cardboard walls, sheet metal roofs, and muddy floors. When the people evicted cross the barbed wire and enter their fenced farm to collect what they planted, the private police record them, detain them, and the corporation reports them for trespassing on private property.

For River Forest, these are not houses or farms, but plots: in a few years, when they manage to make sure no one else lives there, they will transform these tropical forests, these voluptuous meadows full of mango trees, pineapple plantations, and cows into one of the new cities that the Philippines will build. It is rumored in the village that the first thing they will do is build a large shopping center.

For River Forest, these are not houses or farms, but land: in a few years, when they manage to get no one else to live there, they will transform these tropical forests into one of the new cities to be built by the Philippines.

The urban development in the Philippines

George Litton, son of an Irish diplomat and a Chinese immigrant from a merchant family, was born in Singapore in 1895. Upon his father’s death in 1906, he inherited around 2.4 million pounds sterling, which he used to establish a textile factory. By the time George Litton passed away in 1978, the family had become pioneers in the Philippine fabric industry and belonged to the 2% of the population owning 40% of the national territory. Today, after agrarian reforms, 1% of Filipinos control one-fifth of the country’s production.

In the 1970s, the Littons shifted from textiles to real estate, which became the profession of George’s current heirs. They specialized in urban “development.” In 1997, they demolished a residential building to create Liberty Center, a shopping mall in downtown Manila. In 2015, on the outskirts, they opened Mandala Park, another shopping center but with some vegan restaurants. According to their website, in this endeavor they have “reconfigured their approach” to focus on “sustainable development promoting a healthy and community-oriented lifestyle.”

The Littons understand that real estate development will remain profitable for a long time. The Philippine economy is growing at an annual rate of 7%, causing Manila’s population to multiply exponentially. By 2050, the capital is projected to have over 40 million inhabitants, three times the current population. Simultaneously, the city is sinking; by that year, the capital’s coastline is expected to be underwater. In response, real estate is slowly but steadily encroaching on rural territories, while pressure mounts on peasants to migrate to cities.

The Philippines comprises 7,107 islands; half of its population resides in cities, while the other half lives in rural areas, yet most of the food consumed in its cities is imported. They import $1 billion worth of wheat annually from the United States.

The Philippines primarily depends on the service sector, which constitutes 60% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP): tourism, finance, and information technology. The second-largest service export is the remittances sent by Filipinos abroad. Despite being surrounded by Asian tigers, industrial and agricultural sectors never developed significantly; agriculture remains mostly small-scale and unmechanized. The agrarian reform never aimed to redistribute means of production.

Spain colonized the Philippines, but today, few in the country speak Spanish. Unlike the American colonies, there was no obligation to adopt Spanish; it was mainly adopted by the elites. Families that collaborated with Spanish and American colonial authorities took over everything and still maintain oligarchic control of land and dominate the political sphere. In contrast, farmers and fishermen are the two poorest groups of workers, with nearly a third of them living below the poverty line, compared to the national average of around one in five.

The urban development study by Palafox, collaborating with the government, explains on their website: “By 2050, the Philippine population will increase to 148 million (30 million more than today), needing the planning and development of one hundred new cities by then. Otherwise, existing cities will be as congested as Manila is today.” This is a “global phenomenon,” according to developers, as cited by the United Nations, predicting that by 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas.

The Philippines’ Ministry of Urban Development website echoes similar sentiments. For instance, they discuss the goal of “making space” to establish a “continuum between countryside and city.”

By 2050 the population of the Philippines will increase to 148 million (30 million more than today), and to do so, the government says it will need to plan and develop 100 new cities.

William, 55 years old, runs a hardware store on Route 301 and does not reside in Sumalo, but one of the houses in the community belongs to his wife, and they spend weekends there. He says that when his in-laws arrived as part of a national agrarian reform program, neither they nor any of the other original inhabitants of this land processed the property title, “because most of them were illiterate and because registering a property requires legal advice, traveling to the city; things that no one had in mind.”

Papers are also a problem because judicial communications arrive in English, and the peasants do not understand when they receive a letter from the court notifying them “they have to leave” or “you stole a kilogram of pineapples.”

Sumalo was officially created as “Bangalay” — as localities are called in the Philippines — in 1953. It is proof that there was a community living on government lands. In 1979, the RCA corporation, owned by the Littons, bought 214 hectares of land — the entire village — paying an insignificant sum to the government of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, as if no one lived in the place. In the deeds, all this territory is labeled as “unfit for agriculture wasteland.”

When they talk about agrarian reform in the Philippines, they speak in plural terms. There were several. Patches. Not implementations. In 1988, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) was created, promising to be one of the largest land redistribution programs in human history. The slogan was that no one could own more than 5 hectares. Today, there is an agency with ministerial rank to address the issue.

Agrarian reforms have redistributed about 6 million hectares among 3 million people. It’s not insignificant; it’s 70% of what was intended. The problem is that the goal was never to fundamentally reverse inequality but to counteract the growth of communism in the country.

In recent decades, the Filipino government has carried out military operations against groups like the New People’s Army (NPA), associated with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). To this day, there exists a parliamentary-funded anti-communist task force in the Philippines that arrests and kills activists.

Agrarian reforms in the Philippines were carried out from above by conservative dictators. Pure “Gatopardism”: change everything so that nothing changes. For every step forward, there was a step backward.

For example, seven years after passing the major reform, in 1995, the government announced the establishment of an Economic Zone in Bataan, encompassing Sumalo, which would allow the use of this territory for industrial purposes. In other words, it removed these lands from the category eligible for reform and redistribution: if they are not agricultural, they are not subject to reform.

This sparked a long legal battle between the Littons and the peasants. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the family, who took advantage and escalated their advance by filing more than 50 criminal cases against peasant leaders, ranging from minor charges like stealing a bunch of ripe fruits to more serious ones such as kidnapping and illegal possession of firearms.

In 2013, the peasants of Sumalo, under the United Farmers and Residents Organization in Barangay Sumalo (SANAMABASU), submitted a petition to the government, for the thousandth time, to recognize their agrarian reform rights. In 2019, the Office of the President (OP), then under the formidable Rodrigo Duterte (president accused of human rights violations mainly in his “war on drugs”), issued a decree acknowledging that the peasants were right. In practice, it made little difference.

Since 2022, Ferdinand Marcos, son of the former dictator and political heir of Duterte, has been in power. According to activist Clarissa Mendoza, “although the new government tries to show that it prioritizes local farmers and wants to give the country a facelift, corruption is structural; for example, they want to change the constitution to allow foreigners to acquire land in the Philippines. The context is very permissive towards the private sector. In recent years, many corporations have made false accusations against farmers.”

Mendoza, 32 years old, is the coordinator of Katarungan, an acronym that in English means National Secretariat for the Movement for Agrarian Reform and Social Justice. It is an NGO that legally assists various rural populations to access their land rights. Katarungan has about 100 cases like these across the country. For example, on the other side of Bataan on the same island, Luzon, where the “lord of the coconuts” lives.

Agrarian reforms in the Philippines were carried out from above by conservative dictators. Pure “Gatopardism”: change everything so that nothing changes

Sumalo residents organize to fight for their land rights. © Bruna Casas / RUIDO Photo

The last coconut estate of Ca Noni

“Ca” means brother. Here, all men are “Ca” and their nickname. Nonilon Almacen is called Ca Noni. He is tall and slim, with bulging eyes and a distant gaze, as if he is always thinking of something else. Usually, that something else is coconuts.

His dark skin is weathered by 70 years of hard work under the tropical sun. He knows every tree on each of the 300 hectares he owns. “That one over there was planted by my uncle; that one over there must be centuries old, planted by my grandfather.”

He wears worn-out rubber boots that protect his feet from mud and water as he ventures among the coconut trees.

A plain green t-shirt, worn out from use and time, is his faithful companion during long workdays. Despite the 120% humidity, Ca Noni never sweats, never gets agitated. It’s not that he’s adapted; he belongs to this humidity. When he speaks, his voice is sharp and energetic, with the enthusiasm and energy of someone just starting out and the wisdom of a veteran leader. Despite his age, he moves with the agility and precision of a 25-year-old man.

Every morning, Ca Noni rises before dawn. He moves his three cows to graze in different spots, boards a boat that navigates a muddy, muddy, lush, winding river—Amazonian. He disembarks onto an unmarked path that he could traverse blindfolded.

Ninety minutes later, he reaches his coconut trees. He places his hands on his waist and the machete on the ground, looking up to examine the treetops. He’s assessing his coconuts.

Ca Noni knows every tree on each of the 300 hectares he owns. “That one over there was planted by my uncle; the one over there must be centuries old, it was planted by my grandfather.”

Four strong young men work for him. Ca Noni shares half of the profit with them. Unlike some gatherers who prefer to wait for coconuts to fall, Ca Noni’s takes control of the situation. One of them, with long hair and a bare torso, inspects every bulge on the tree trunk, finding suitable hand and footholds. With careful movements, he grips a protrusion and begins to ascend, pushing himself with his feet while searching for the next foothold.

He holds onto his machete. He moves with determination, maintaining a steady pace as he climbs to the top. Upon reaching the top, he ensures a firm grip before releasing any foothold and, with a precise stroke of his blade, frees the coconuts from their branches, letting them fall to the ground with a dull thud. The rest of the team loads the coconuts into a bag made from fiber of the outer husk, hang two on each side of a white horse’s back, and take them to a ranch where they will be left to dry.

Ca Noni oversees the drying process, ensuring each coconut is split in half with the flesh exposed. He sits down to open them up and extract the pulp. Using an improvised shredder, he separates the husk.

The dried pulp resembles rubber, like a piece of gum. It’s used to make oil, soaps, cosmetics, candles, and coconut flour, which is both edible and used to fertilize the soil for more palm growth and coconut yields.

Ca Noni owns 3 hectares of coconut trees, as well as bananas and rice legally allocated under the agrarian reform plan, but originally belonged to his ancestors. I ask him if he’s ever calculated how many coconuts he’s harvested in his life.

He asks for paper and a pen, then writes out a multiplication: 2500 coconuts per year, per 200 trees, over fifty years, concluding, “25 million. My family and I have harvested 25 million coconuts from this farm.”

Ca Noni owns 3 hectares of coconut trees, as well as bananas and rice that were legally given to him by the agrarian reform plan but which previously belonged to his ancestors. In total, he and his family have harvested 25 million coconuts.

They married on January 14, 1973, the same year Ca Noni took over the family coconut farm. They have two sons and a daughter, and nine grandchildren. In the afternoon, Ca Noni rests in the house that he and Inan, his wife, had “dreamed of all their lives”: in a mountain full of palm trees where they always wanted to live, amidst a jungle stretching towards the coast of the Philippine Sea.

Inan gazes out of one of the windows. A downpour falls over the dense jungle, and a gentle breeze, like a fan, flutters the Christmas-patterned curtains.

The television sits on a cabinet dividing the living room in half. On one side, there is a table where she recently placed fried tilapias, roasted bananas, and a pot of white rice for lunch. Now, a basket full of small bananas rests on one of the tables. Everything has been grown by them or their neighbors in this mountain.

On the other side of the living room, there are three wooden armchairs. In the two-seater, Ca Noni reclines while watching TV without paying attention to the content: he squints when the karaoke contest ends and the soap opera that Inan was waiting for begins. She lies down on the armrest of a single-seater chair and lifts her leg, stretching.

One of the granddaughters leaves her post at the kiosk just outside the house to go to the bathroom; but when she returns, she watches what’s on TV and decides to take a break. So, she curls up on her grandmother’s arm to watch the soap opera with her.

Ca Noni, who seemed to be peacefully resting, suddenly gets up agitatedly, as if from a nightmare. He goes to the bedroom to fetch a folder containing forms and legal letters, then sits back down in the armchair and, looking at Inan and his granddaughter, points to a folder resting on the coffee table.

Inan says that Ca Noni has become fixated on this one thing, that he can’t stop talking about this folder. But she’s worried too. The folder contains judicial notices, maps, deeds, announcements, photocopies of laws… She says, “this can’t be happening, this just can’t be.”

The government annulled the title to their land. At some point, says Ca Noni, they will come to expel him and the hundreds of peasants from their wet meadows, their palm trees, their coconuts.

The government revoked the land title they had obtained through agrarian reforms. Ca Noni says at some point they will come to evict him and hundreds of farmers from their wet meadows, palm trees, and coconuts.

Inside the folder, there’s a pamphlet about a government plan for these lands. Ca Noni looks at it, his voice breaking as he reads the title aloud, but when he finishes saying it, he curses in Chabacano. On the cover of the folder, it reads that in the 1,900 hectares of this jungle, there will eventually be airplanes taking off and landing: “Coming soon: airport.”

On the cover of the folder you can read that in the 1900 hectares of this jungle there will be airplanes taking off and landing at some point: “Coming soon: airport”.