Case 2: “The Mortal Enemy”

The respondent is 78 years old, female, married with 5 children. She started working in

Hacienda when she was 18 years old, here she met her husband, but unfortunately her partner

was not included in the master list, so she was not given a land. On the other hand, what the

respondent does in hacienda was cutting sugarcane and grazing cows and goats, what they do

there every day is different that's why they call themselves “all around”.

According to respondent she worked in hacienda almost half of her life, because of her

perseverance to work, she was able to support her family together with her husband . While

she was cutting sugarcane, her husband was busy operating farm tractors. This is the source of

their income until 2004, because this was the time when they stopped working in hacienda. Here

they were tested by extreme hardships in life.

By that time when they lost their jobs, her husband ventured outside while she sold street

food and peddled potholders that she sewed from the laces of the tailors in the town, she bought

them for a small amount and she sells it house to house under the sun, just walking. This saved

them from their daily expenses. With their little savings, they were able to send their two

children in school and the other three needed to stop in studying and decided to look for extra

work in their neighbors or in their barangays.

Year 2019, according to the respondent, the Department of Agrarian Reform has

distributed to farmers more than one hundred hectares of land in Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac.

Apart from the land that they got separately, they also received a lot for them to build their home.

the farmer on their land is her husband and her son who lives with them. They planted it with

rice and corn, since the couple got two plots of land, half with rice and the other half with corn.

Sometimes it's just rice and vice versa.

 The land is a big help to them, so every harvest season, they earn 120,000 pesos and this

will last them 4 months, she also gives money to her children to supplement the cost of educating

her grandchildren. And one of his sons, who is married and has a child, returned to her, and

settled there to increase the partner of her husband in tending the land. Because according to the

respondent it takes 4 months to care for rice before harvesting it, the same with corn.

According to the respondent aside from self-cultivation and harvest. She said that the

Department of Agriculture has not abandoned them because until now they are still being given

assistance, such as fertilizer, seedlings and other things that can be planted and cash aid of 5,000

pesos, but the aid is only once a year. Apart from this, the Department of Agriculture also had

seminars on how to properly care for crops and also seminars on how to operate the machines

used in the field. Because of this with the programs of the Department of Agriculture, they grew

their land even more and resulted in a good income.

According to the respondent, as time passed, their lives were not always at the top. The

only money coming in is his pension from SSS worth 4,000 pesos. they also encountered

problems such as typhoons that destroyed their crops. But their worst enemy according to her is

the black bugs that destroy their crops, because it's so small, you wouldn't think that when you

wake up the next day, almost half of the crops that were perfectly fine yesterday are ruined.

According to her, the pest attack, when not properly controlled, can reportedly cause losses of up

to 65 percent involving 10 adult rice black bugs per hill. But still, they remain positive in life,

and those who were not killed by the black bug are overtaken and sell it to the market.

She suggested that the government should have a free anti pesticide to all the farmers of

Hacienda. There are times they are facing unexpected deluges because they are not in control of
what will happen. “Hopefully, the Department of Agriculture could help us control the rice black

bug because the one that we are using to control black bug is not effective,” she concluded.