Agroecology X

Agroecology X is a unique community of organizations, associations, sustainable agriculture

practitioners, social entrepreneurs, organic food buffs, and many other believers and doers
of agroecology and advocates of food sovereignty.

Calls regarding the Situation of Agricultural Workers in Plantations

1. Support agricultural workers. Increase the wages of sugar workers. End

contractualization. Ensure working conditions are safe and humane.
Implement a national minimum wage of Php750.

2. Respect and uphold the rights of agricultural workers. Agricultural

workers in plantations, both local- and foreign-owned plantations, should be
able to exercise their rights to unionize and freedom of expression. Workers
should be able to craft their demands in the form of a collective bargaining
agreement with the management. Illegal practices such as union-busting,
red-tagging, harassment, imprisonment, forced surrenderees, and
extrajudicial killings among the ranks of unionized workers should be stopped
and perpetrators should be held accountable. Justice must be served to all
agricultural workers unjustly imprisoned and extrajudicially killed.

3. Provide appropriate aid to agricultural workers. The government is

mandated to provide aid to sugar workers and their families during the
so-called Tiempo Muerto, which means dead- or off-milling season. They
should also be provided with immediate aid and relief during times of
disasters and calamities.

4. Junk liberalization of the country's sugar industry and agriculture.

Instead, the government should support the local food producers. The
unbridled land grabbing of foreign plantations on protected areas and
indigenous peoples’ ancestral domains should be halted.

5. Support and recognize collective cultivation and initiatives of the

peasants to attain food security. There should be public support towards
agroecological initiatives towards a genuinely pro-people food system.
Corporate capture on food systems and agriculture should be terminated.
Farmers’ and agricultural workers’ demands should be heard and prioritized in
the policy-making and implementation process.
6. Implement a Genuine Agrarian Reform Program and National
Industrialization. Large haciendas and plantations should be dismantled and
distributed free of charge to farmers, farmworkers, and agricultural workers.
Support services and subsidies should continue to promote rural
development. The free distribution of land to the landless peasants would be
the economic foundation for the establishment of a national industrialization
program in the country.