Community and Private Lands

Within Buguias, only a few small plots are under community management. It is interesting that these represent not a survival but rather a new form of communal tenure, one devised to protect dwindling forest resources. When the Americans established the Cordilleran Forest Reserve, they "awarded" each community a small woodlot for common use, that of Buguias covering some 70 hectares. These forests were not respected. They had no indigenous roots, and the larger "public" reserves, although formally ceded to lumber and mining corporations, were still considered village property. Eventually the entire "Buguias Communal Forest" was cleared for gardens. But by the late 1960s, a perceived need to stem forest clearing prompted the reinvention of the communal forest at the local level. Within Buguias, the residents of Demang, the hamlet to the west of the Agno, grew concerned over the use of their wood to support a building boom in the center of town. Realizing that their pine stands would soon be exhausted, the local elders argued for partial closure and communal control. The hamlet accepted their proposal; henceforth outsiders could obtain fire-

wood and lumber only if first granted permission by the elders. To date, no other hamlet of Buguias has established a common forest.

The Americans designated a few communal lands, but the thrust of their land policy was to privatize indigenous holdings in order to facilitate the expropriation of all "unclaimed" land as public domain—which could in turn be consigned to corporate interests. But the colonial government lacked the wherewithal to carry out the requisite surveys, and the hurried examinations they did conduct assured a discordant future.

The first major postcolonial change in land policy came during the Magsaysay era of the mid-1950s. Magsaysay supported a partial land reform as part of his strategy to stanch rural unrest in the lowlands. His Executive Order 180 of 1956 allowed cultivators to claim certain lands within the public domain. Benguet gardeners could now theoretically acquire title to their plots, even if they lay within the Forest Reserve. To guard against soil erosion and watershed destruction, however, the state required each farmer to obtain a release from several government agencies (Baguio Midland Courier April 8, 1956). Such bureaucratic maneuverings proved formidable; each farmer had to negotiate with the Bureau of Forests, the Bureau of Land, the Bureau of Soil Conservation, and several other agencies as well. Later administrations strengthened and extended the rights established under Executive Order 180, but the titling procedure remained cumbersome, while new natural resource laws actually erected additional hurdles.^[2]

The Marcos regime continued to make vain promises and to pass unenforceable laws. In signing Executive Order 87, Marcos only raised new hedges in the maze; now deed-seeking farmers had to gain clearance from the Bureau of Forestry, the Mountain Province Development Authority, the Bureau of Parks and Wildlife, the Reforestation Administration, the Bureau of Highways, and the National Power Corporation. Two years later, Proclamation 548 placed 182,000 hectares of the upper Agno drainage—including virtually all Buguias—into a watershed protection zone (Tauli 1984:82); new titles were to be prohibited here and indigenous forestry and cultivation severely restricted.

After Marcos declared martial law in 1972, the state again tackled the Cordilleran land issue. Presidential Decree 410, signed in 1974, provided for the parceling of all Philippine "ancestral

lands" into 5-hectare private plots (Lynch 1984). Although Benguet was expressly excluded, this act would have threatened the territorial integrity of most Igorot communities had it been enforced. Then in 1976, seeking to combat erosion, the state mandated that no lands of more than 18 percent slope could be titled. This act officially excluded most of Buguias from title application.

Not surprisingly, few farmers have found their way through the land titling labyrinth. Lynch (1984: 195) tells of one man who moved through twelve certification levels before abandoning his quest. Most farmers found the necessary journeys to Manila too expensive and baffling. But a few growers persevered, and in so doing eventually learned to move smoothly through the halls of government. This knowledge enabled them to become legal entrepreneurs of sorts: individuals who could secure titles for others in return for a part of the newly legitimated property.

Legal entrepreneurship required a thorough understanding of Philippine land policy. To title a parcel located within the Forest Reserve, for example, one had to process papers at a series of agencies in the correct order, at each step convincing the responsible officials that the mandated conservation measures had been adopted. To title a plot already classified as Alienable and Disposable yet never before registered, a court order was also necessary.^[3] Unclassified lands presented a different challenge; here the entrepreneur had to use political channels, including Imelda Marcos's Ministry of Human Settlements, to gain reclassification. And presidential caprice could undo successful work; lands in Tuba municipality along the "Marcos Highway," for instance, had been reclassified after years of local activism to allow prepatent titles, but in 1982 Marcos decreed that a 5 kilometer strip on either side of his eponymous road should remain a watershed preserve.

The several legal entrepreneurs have provided a valued service for Benguet farmers. They are perceived as acting in the common good, and their fees are generally considered to be deserved. Their strategy contrasts markedly with that of a more rapacious group of property law operators discussed below under the rubric of "land pirates."

Government policies allowing land titling have been aimed primarily at Mountain Trail growers. Now the center of vegetable culture, the Mountain Trail area was largely untouched by the prewar

American surveys since it was virtually unsettled at the time. In the Agno Valley, by contrast, much prime agricultural land was titled, or at least declared Alienable and Disposable (and thus eligible for titling), during the first years of American rule. As a result, land controversy here often revolves around disputed "real" ownership of long-titled land.