Hacienda Luisita Farmworkers Hold Paper Titles That the Cane Mill Reads as Suggestions

Thirty-eight years after the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law was signed in June 1988, the farmworker-beneficiaries of Hacienda Luisita are holding Certificates of Land Ownership Award that read like promises and function like coupons. The land was distributed. The economy on top of it was not.

The April 2012 Supreme Court ruling ordered the 4,915-hectare estate broken up and handed to roughly 6,000 beneficiaries. DAR issued lot assignments across the barangays of Tarlac City and Concepcion that fall inside the estate. The processing chain that turns cane into cash never moved.

The title on the wall, the price on the truck

A CLOA gives you the lot. It does not give you a buyer. Sugar in Central Luzon moves through a small set of mills, and the Central Azucarera de Tarlac in Barangay San Miguel, Tarlac City sits in the middle of that funnel. The beneficiary plants, harvests, loads, and hauls. The mill weighs, tests, and prices.

The standard arrangement is a sharing system on raw sugar and molasses, with the planter shouldering hauling, fertilizer, and labor up front. When the mill sets the LKG conversion or quedan value low, the share that lands in the farmworker's hands after deductions can shrink to a number that does not cover the next planting. Some beneficiaries have gone back to working their own land as wage hands for aryendador lessees who consolidated the small plots into something a mill will talk to.

Aryendo is not reform, it is rent

Land transfers on paper, then leases back in practice. This is the quiet shape of agrarian reform in a lot of the country, not just Luisita. Agrarian reform advocates have flagged for years that beneficiaries with CLOAs but no capital, no irrigation, no credit line, and no buyer leverage end up signing aryendo contracts that hand effective control back to the same families and the same agribusinesses the program was supposed to displace.

The estate was carved up. The mill gate logic is intact. In 2015, the Cojuangco clan's Tarlac Development Corporation sold controlling interest in Central Azucarera de Tarlac to a group led by businessmen Martin Lorenzo and Fernando Cojuangco for around P1.8 billion. The Sugar Regulatory Administration's mill directory still lists Fernando Ignacio C. Cojuangco as president of the mill. A beneficiary who refuses the offered cane price has nowhere else to send a truck of stalks before they spoil.

The decade after 2012 never closed out

The November 2004 Hacienda Luisita massacre is the part the country remembers. The part that did not make it into the textbook is the years after the 2012 ruling: contested lot assignments, ghost beneficiaries on the master list, farmworker leaders reporting eviction from lots they were awarded, and a queue of cases at the DAR Adjudication Board that outlasted three administrations. Some beneficiaries died waiting on the paperwork. Their heirs are now the claimants.

President Marcos signed the New Agrarian Emancipation Act in 2023, condoning roughly P58 billion in unpaid land amortizations. Nothing in that law touches the cane price. Nothing in it builds a beneficiary-owned mill. The debt got cleared. The dependency stayed.

The farmworkers in Tarlac are not asking for a thirty-ninth anniversary statement from the agency. They want a buyer that is not the mill, a credit line that is not the lessee, and a hauling contract that does not eat the harvest. Until one of those three exists, the CLOA is a frame on the wall and the cane truck still goes where it has always gone.