Land reform in the Philippines has long been a contentious issue rooted in the concentration of land ownership in landed elites during the Spanish colonial period. Some state-led land reform initiatives began during the American colonial period, following independence in response to the Huk Rebellion, during martial law, and especially following the People Power Revolution in 1986. The current law, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), was passed in 1986 but its implementation remains unfinished to this day. Strong peasant movement mobilization that maximized CARP for land claims in the 1990s made significant yet partial land redistribution possible, encompassing about half of total agricultural lands and benefitting three-fifths of all agricultural households. However, loopholes and weaknesses in the law have been used to evade and reverse reforms. Aside from pushing for the completion of land redistribution under CARP, peasant movements have called attention to increasing violence against land claimants, reversals of redistribution in favor of former and new landowners, aggressive agricultural land-use conversions, and lack of government support services for beneficiaries. As of 2026, the Department of Agrarian Reform says 700,000 hectares of agricultural lands has yet to be awarded to farmers.
History Much like Mexico and other Spanish colonies in the Americas, the Spanish settlement in the Philippines revolved around the encomienda system of plantations, known as haciendas. As the 19th century progressed, industrialization and liberalization of trade allowed these encomiendas to expand their cash crops, establishing a strong sugar industry in the Philippines, especially in the Visayan island of Negros.
American period The United States of America obtained the Spanish claim over the Philippines following the Spanish–American War in 1898 and conquered the country from the Philippine Republic after the Philippine–American War in 1902. The Second Philippine Commission, the Taft Commission, viewed economic development as one of its top three goals. In 1901, 93% of the islands' land area was held by the government and William Howard Taft, Governor-General of the Philippines, argued for a liberal policy so that a good portion could be sold off to American investors. Instead, the United States Congress, influenced by agricultural interests that did not want competition from the Philippines, in the 1902 Land Act, set a limit of 16 hectares of land to be sold or leased to American individuals and 1,024 hectares to American corporations. This and a downturn in the investment environment discouraged the foreign-owned plantations common in British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and French Indochina. Further the U.S. Federal Government faced the problem of much of the private land being owned by the Catholic Church and controlled by Spanish clerics. The American government—officially secular, hostile to continued Spanish control of much of the land of the now-American colony, and long hostile to Catholics—negotiated a settlement with the Church handing over its land. The 1902 Philippine Organic Act was a constitution for the Insular Government, as the U.S. civil administration was known. This act, among other actions, disestablished the Catholic Church as the state religion. The United States government, in an effort to resolve the status of the friars, negotiated with the Vatican. The church agreed to sell the friars' estates and promised gradual substitution of Filipino and other non-Spanish priests for the friars. It refused, however, to withdraw the religious orders from the islands immediately, partly to avoid offending Spain. In 1904 the administration bought for $7.2 million the major part of the friars' holdings, amounting to some 166,000 hectares (410,000 acres), of which one-half was in the vicinity of Manila. The land was eventually resold to Filipinos, some of them tenants but the majority of them estate owners.
Commonwealth Period During the American Colonial Period, tenant farmers complained about the sharecropping system, as well as by the dramatic increase in population which added economic pressure to the tenant farmers' families. As a result, an agrarian reform program was initiated by the Commonwealth. However, success of the program was hampered by ongoing clashes between tenants and landowners. An example of these clashes includes one initiated by Benigno Ramos through his Sakdalista movement, which advocated tax reductions, land reforms, the breakup of the large estates or haciendas, and the severing of American ties. The uprising, which occurred in Central Luzon in May 1935, claimed about a hundred lives
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