similarities of the rights of tenants under rice share act and agricultural act summary
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The Rice Share Tenancy Act as amended in 1946 is a much misunderstood piece of legislation in the Philippines today, and unfortunately that misunderstanding has been perpetuated by many Western reporters on Philippine affairs.
Former President Roxas did a magnificent job of salesmanship when he attached to this Act the label “the seventy-thirty law”. But popular though this terminology may have been, it has little relationship to the provisions of the Act. A more descriptive title, “the fifty-fifty law” would undoubtedly have been less popular.
The original Rice Share Tenancy Act was passed by the Philippine Legislature in 1933, during the administration of Governor-General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. He and many of the legislators were aware of the increasing inequality of the tenants’ and the landlords’ bargaining power. They believed that legislation, even legislation alone, could balance the unbalanced social forces — a belief not often verified by Philippine experience.
The Act’s many admirable provisions were unfortunately rendered useless by the final one. The law could go into effect “only in provinces where the majority of the municipal councils shall, by resolution, petition for its application to the Governor-General who shall make the law effective by proclamation”.1 In view of the landlords’ control of the municipal councils, it was hardly surprising that in no province did this law come into effect.
But while reform by legislation was frustrated, changes of another kind did take place on the land. By 1939 some 35.1 percent of all farmers were tenants-more than double the percentage twenty years earlier. And the tenancy problem was, in reality, the rice share tenancy problem: 98.4 percent of tenants were share tenants and 54.8 percent of those were rice share tenants.2 Rice was the Philippines first crop, taking 39.1 percent of the farm area and 39.9 percent of rice farmers were share tenants. The second crop by area, coconut, accounted for only 11.8 percent of the share tenants, while 21.8 percent of the share tenants were on corn farms and 2.8 percent on sugar farms.
The tenancy problem was geographically as peculiar to Central Luzon as it was agronomically to rice. In 1939 five Central Luzon provinces, all of which had the greater part of their farm land planted to rice, had share tenancy rates above 50 percent: Tarlac, 50.5, Cavite, 53.5, Bulacan, 62.2, Pampanga, 64.6, and Nueva Ecija, 66.3.3 The only place outside Central Luzon where rice culture and high tenancy rates coexisted was Panay. In the third important rice growing region, Hocos, the land was usually cultivated by its owners.
In most cases these tenancy figures were disturbing to former President Manuel Quezon and other Filipino leaders only insofar as they were associated with agrarian unrest. But the tenancy rate cannot be said to be a complete explanation of unrest-and population density, poverty and backwardness of agricultural techniques are even less adequate explanations of this phenomenon. The sharp increase of tenancy in the 1930’S throws more light on the problem, but only the broad term “change” can fully explain agrarian unrest, or other revolutionary outbreaks. The change was both economic and psychological. The Filipino tao (peasant) was in increasing numbers being reduced from owner to tenant at the same time that education with all its attendant blessings (or evils), as well as high-sounding phrases from Manila politicians spread abroad by press and radio, was raising the tao’s expectation of the kind of life he was entitled to. Thus the politicos who wrote a piece of “reform legislation” which could not be put in effect unwittingly abetted the incipient unrest. Tenants’ hopes, especially those of the more politically alert, were raised, then dashed.