The country’s peace process negotiation is in a stalemate, and this is not good. Our Muslim brothers and sisters recently celebrated the final rites of the annual Hajj—Eid’l Adha, or commonly called as “The Feast of the Sacrifice,” reflecting on the story of Ibrahim’s obedience to God through his willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael. Alongside this important commemoration, I hope we have pondered the need for the public and our government to return their attention and commitment toward bringing sustainable peace and security in Mindanao. Our people in the conflict zone or war-torn areas of Mindanao have sacrificed enough to continue placing their trust in our bureaucracy, pleading through prayers and hope amid a seemingly endless volatile socioeconomic environment.
After five presidential regimes and three decades, the peace process negotiation between the Philippine government and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines started with good impressions during the early months of President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration. In order to accommodate the interests and hear the concerns of both parties, the negotiators opted to run through this settlement within the arrangement of multilateralism. However, the negotiation may still be far from achieving its end goal; the NDFP’s insistence on radical agrarian land reform has been the stumbling block for the government to return its bureaucratic stamina back to the negotiating table.
In the NDFP’s proposal draft, the Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms, provisions for free agricultural land conveyances, to be sourced through expropriation and “confiscation” are being put forth as solutions to poverty in the countryside. In turn, the Philippine government has signified its willingness to agree to the proposal, and has even communicated a readiness to fund it. However, questions still linger with regard to the fiscal and economic viability of implementing such a plan and its legal feasibility under prevailing Philippine laws.
The utility of multilateralism in conducting negotiations concerning critical agrarian issues is a complex and delicate arrangement to pursue. Although this pushes for greater inclusivity as it tries to address the interests of all other sectors such as the indigenous people and other constituencies, this process is at high stakes as these involvements might also call for renegotiation and thus, termination of whatever progress that may have been attained.
Due to the number of times the peace process has been stalled, and with multilateralism innately requiring a more unyielding involvement of various policy perspectives, the peace process may have developed into a conglomerate of competitive bureaucratic and organizational entities, wherein decisions are done by competition, bargaining, and compromise among the various actors involved. The participating entities have differing economic and political leverages to fully comply with the demands of the multilateralism. The tension is still undeniable since there are interests that cannot be compromised in this complicated issue of contradicting ideologies.
Given this kind of negotiation arrangement, every stakeholder in the negotiation needs to be a bridging leader.
A bridging leader needs to have self-awareness in order to deepen the sense of ownership of the confronted issues and challenges. The government as a whole needs to understand the dynamics of the divisions that have been induced within the negotiation, and should identify what roles it needs to take to bridge the divides. Then, based on its systematic understanding of the induced divisions, and the scale of its bureaucratic leverages, the government needs to envision the equitable and realistic outcomes it wants to create. The outcomes should be a potential source to bring together the stakeholders for collaborative policy formulation. Bringing together the stakeholders in the negotiation is not just about the exultant exchange of professional or academic perspectives. As a bridging leader, relationships must be forged toward a common understanding and collaborative response to address the divisions. Finally, specific objectives have been identified, policies have been crafted, and mechanisms for appropriate compliance have been solidified—these, should all be done collaboratively.
To be fair, the problem on free land transfer has been gradually addressed by the current administration; with the hopes of finally ending the long-overdue government agrarian reform program, free land distribution was institutionalized under the Duterte administration’s Philippine Development Plan 2017-2022. The nationwide undertaking will cost a hefty amount of P98 billion. The amount will come on top of the roughly P72 billion in coco levy funds which Duterte promised to give back the farmers, and about P2 billion—probably rising each year—in free irrigation subsidies.
However, since the government only has a hold on publicly owned property while the NDFP demands land reforms that involve select private lands, compromises would play a big part on how this negotiation will turn out. Therefore, we cannot afford to keep the peace process in a long hiatus. This particular issue in the Caser would not only change how the local farmers earn, but it would also cause a commotion in the national agricultural system, and in the appropriate interpretation and practice of our legal system on land acquisition. The progress in this particular agreement will reflect the capability of the administration to work with different actors, be it the private or the public, without sacrificing one in favor of the other.
Jonathan Eli Libut is a research consultant at the TeaM Energy Center for Bridging Leadership of the Asian Institute of Management.