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• Land reform - refers to a wide variety of programs and measures usually by the government to bring about more effective control and use of land for the benefit of the community
• Land reform - generally comprise the takeover of land by state from big land lords with compensation, and transfer it to small farmers or landless workers.
• Land reform - It is aimed at changing the agrarian structure to bring equity and to increase productivity.
• Land reform - the structure includes both the relationship of man to his land, and man’s relationship with others (tenant and landlord)
• Agrarian reform is more complex
• Agrarian reform - also includes measures to modernize the agricultural practices and improving the living conditions of everyone within the entire agrarian community
• Agrarian reform - supports to agricultural education, the establishment of cooperatives; development of institutions to provide agricultural credit and other inputs; processing and marketing of agricultural produce; and establishment of ago-based industries, and others
• Purpose the desire to obtain social justice and full development of the dignity of man within given situations of land reform
• One of the effects of colonizing periods was the concentration of landholdings in the hands of the law
• landlords or caciques - have yielded tremendous influence in the social and economic life of the nation that they had been able to dictate to their dependents (the tenants and their families) to such matters as to whom to vote for in political elections
• Landlord or cacique - They have also influenced political action in various ways in order to maintain the status quo
• Pre spanish era - 900 to 1565
• Filipino social system was feudal
• Like the feudalistic system in the medieval Europe, a warrior class existed bound by fealty to a warlord.
• Warrior class - This class lived on the labor of the serfs and slaves but in exchange, this warrior class protected them and exercised a ready though rough kind of justice.
• Within the Filipino social structure, the datus (chiefs) comprised the nobility (maharlikas). Then there are the timawas (freemen), followed by the aliping namamahay (serfs) and aliping saguiguilid (slaves).
• The freeborn did not pay tributes or taxes to the datu, but were bound to follow him to war. They provided their own weapons and gears, manned the cars when they set sail, built their houses, and planted their rice fields
• The serfs served his master or lord, who may be a datu or someone else who is a maharlika, and tilled his land.
• Both master and serfs equally divided the produce of the land
• The serfs corresponded to the aparceros (tenants) of the late 19th century Spanish era.
• In the subsistence economy of the early Filipinos, money was unknown, and rice served as the medium of exchange
• Spanish era - 1565 to 1898
• Lands were divided and granted to encourage Spanish settlers or reward soldiers who served the Crown. These were called encomiendas.
• The conditions of this grant state that the encomendero must defend his encomienda from external attack, maintain peace and order within, and support the missionaries
• In consideration of these services, the encomendero acquired the right to collect tribute from the indios (natives) in the amount and form determined by the royal government.
• The encomienda system established for the benefit of the natives than of the encomenderos.
• The tributes they were authorized to collect soon became land rents, and the people living within the boundaries of the encomienda became tenants.
• The encomenderos became the first group of hacenderos in the country
• colonial government took the place of the datus.
• The datu was now called cabeza de barangay, but it was the proprietors of the estates who held the real power in the barangay or community
• four classes of estate proprietors in the Philippines during the Spanish period:

  1, the religious orders Dominican and Augustinian;

  2, the Spanish peninsulares;

  3, the criollos and mestizos; and

  4, the native principales
• The Dominican friars leased their lands to both the natives and mestizos, who became known as inquilinos.
• Each inquilino paid a fixed ground rent for the area he cultivated, and the estate owner was not allowed to lease the land to others unless the incumbent leaseholder failed to pay the rent for two consecutive years.
• inquilinos abused this policy by disposing off the lands as if they owned them. They sold their interest in them or mortgaged to wealthy takers, or sub-leased them at rents higher than what they themselves paid
• inquilinos, earned more than the estate owners without doing virtually any work.
• This became the root of a system in which native agricultural entrepreneurs that tilled and cleared the land with the aid of tenants whom they hired on a sharecropping basis had to lease the land.
• In time, the system evolved a set of practices that soon began to exploit the tenant tillers.
• Although Spanish authorities were aware of these pernicious practices, no effective measures were made in spite of two royal decrees issued in 1880 and 1184 urging landholders to secure titles
• Decree 1880 and 1184 - Under these decrees, the government granted a term of one year within which claims for free titles were to be filed
• Those few were mostly of the cacique class, who claimed more lands than they actually had a right to. As a result, the actual tillers were driven out of their land or forced to become tenants of the caciques