TAKING LANDS, TAKING LIVES 2019
Year-end Report on the Situation of Filipino Environmental Defenders Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan PNE)
The murders of Filipino environmental defenders are on the rise once again in 2019. Despite a whopping 80% of the cases linked to identified state security forces or perpetrated in the notorious death squad fashion, even forest rangers and other government officials working to protect the environment are not spared from this climate of impunity.
These deaths represent the arduous people’s struggles to protect a total of 1.2 million hectares of forest and agricultural landscapes that provide valuable ecosystem services amounting to P212.8 billion annually.
In the context of the crucial decision points in the ongoing up to next year’s negotiations in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the imperative to protect the rights of these environmental defenders who hold the most effective and most urgent solutions to the climate crisis becomes of even greater importance.
Destructive projects as drivers
Kalikasan PNE monitored a total of 46 cases of extrajudicial killings this year, a 53% increase compared to 2018’s total pegged at 30. The worsening land conflicts driven by agribusiness and other land grabs comprise 70% of these recorded killings.
In the island of Negros, the land occupation and cultivation campaigns by landless agriworkers and small farmers under the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW) have been met with brutal force from synchronized enhanced managing of police operations (SEMPO) and other counter insurgency programs.
Instead of targeting actual insurgents, these internal security operations are serving as investment defense for almost 428,000 hectares of undistributed agrarian reform lands still controlled by landowner families and agribusiness companies.
In the watersheds of Bukidnon, meanwhile, the struggle of small farmers and indigenous Lumad people against agribusiness plantations amounting to more than 100,000 hectares, as well as mining application interests covering 31,180 hectares across the Pantaron Mountain Range, have been attacked under blanket military rule.
Paramilitary groups and riding-in-tandem assassins are systematically targeting members and leaders of farmers group Unyon sa Mag-Uuma sa Agusan del Norte (UMAN) and indigenous groups under the Kalumbay Regional Lumad Organization.
A significant trend this year is the rise of attacks against government forest rangers and other local government officials, which combine for 22% of all recorded cases. Last September 4, El Nido forest ranger Bienvenido Venguilla Jr. was hacked to death by illegal loggers from which they confiscated a chainsaw, despite having a firearm with him for protection.
Militarization hotspots
A spatial analysis of the spread of killings would show how areas subjected to heavy militarization supposedly for internal security are the areas where the most number of environmental defenders are being killed.
