Recently, social justice received a shot in the arm in the Philippines, when the Supreme Court issued a decision last month directing the Hacienda Luisita, Inc. (HLI) to directly distribute 4,916 hectares of farmland to the original 6,296 original farm worker beneficiaries and to pay PhP 1.3 billion (US$30.2 million) to the laborers as their share in the proceeds from a previous transaction where HLI sold 580 hectares of the hacienda.

This legal outcome may now appear to be the end of a tortuous journey for the hacienda's farmers and farm workers. It sends a signal to indigenous and forest communities to be vigilant against the threat of corporate control in place of authentic community empowerment. And yet this landmark decision may really even be just the beginning of what could be an even more difficult, problematic, and complex process.

The beneficiaries still have to face the reality of meeting amortization payments. Various field researches have shown a high incidence of default payments among amortizing land reform beneficiaries. Some of these studies also revealed that amortizing beneficiaries are not significantly better off in income than those who have remained tenants under the law. This would tend to indicate that amortization payments are often unaffordable to farmers. For a significant percentage, this has meant outright cancellation of their Certificates of Land Ownership Awards (CLOAs) and Emancipation Patents, forfeiting their legal rights to the land. For others, this has meant borrowing from usurious moneylenders by hocking their land and land use rights and eventually losing their farmlands.

For the Hacienda Luisita farmers and agricultural laborers, the levels of land amortization payments are yet to be finalized. If they do turn out to be economically burdensome for the beneficiaries, then they would sadly defeat the very purpose of agrarian reform, which is precisely to effect the redistribution of rural income and thus alleviate poverty in a major way. Redistribution of land therefore must result in redistribution of income. Otherwise, it fails as a social justice exercise.

Now as legal owners and future managers of their farmland, the farmers and farm laborers of what was the hacienda are expected to exercise effective control over the land they till. Moreover, they are expected to reap and truly enjoy the just fruits of their labor. In particular, they are expected to attain farm income that is adequate enough to meet their amortization payments as well as buy enough needed farm inputs for increasing farm productivity. And yet, they may still be at the mercy of traders and middlemen who may not control the land directly but who do control farm gate prices to the detriment of farmers. As the produce of farmers is undervalued at the market, they may and often do end up almost as impoverished as before.

The transformation in Hacienda Luisita could be made much more meaningful if it was developed not only as a model of social equity but also one of sustainable development and protection of poor communities.

Hacienda Luisita was also a prime example of the export-crop monoculture based on environmentally unsustainable methods. Its sugar crop largely relied on the heavy application of chemical fertilizers that depleted the soil's nutrients and rendered it acidic. Organic methods of farming that promote biodiversity in the soil would provide ecological alternatives to these unsustainable farm technologies.

Moreover, Hacienda Luisita, like most farmlands in Tarlac, Central Luzon, and in the entire Philippines, is poorly irrigated, with irrigation water at most effectively available only during the rainy season. In particular, farming in Hacienda Luisita relies on water drained from the 28,300-hectare Balog-Balog sub-watershed, layered into the eastern Zambales mountain range. Water resources in this area and the entire region are affected to a great extent by forest denudation and degradation. The watershed area is "covered mostly with grassland, and second-growth or residual forests" according to a project report. The forest cover is merely 30%, with only the upper catchment (700-1,000 meters above sea level) still intact. Today, timber poaching persists in the watershed.

Recently, the Philippine government sought to address the lack of irrigation and power supply in the Tarlac area, including Hacienda Luisita, by way of a big 113.5-meter-high dam project, the PhP 18.5-billion Balog-Balog multipurpose project. It is considered to be the biggest PPP (Public-Private-Partnership) project of the government's Department of Agriculture. Unfortunately, the large dam project, located in San Jose, Tarlac, forcibly displaces upland farming communities, roughly a fourth of the households of which are members of the Aeta indigenous people. Part of the dam project area belongs to the ancestral land claim filed by the Aeta communities and still being processed by the government. If realized, this development would perpetuate a long historical chain of dislocating and further marginalizing the original indigenous people in the country.

Meanwhile, despite the overwhelming challenges, Hacienda Luisita farmers seek to temper their fears with a strong sense of social cohesion. Their farmer leader-beneficiaries indicated that they want the land owned, managed, and farmed cooperatively or collectively. Such a tenurial and production arrangement would be positive in that it would enhance not only their productivity, but also their social solidarity, giving them greater bargaining power in marketing their produce. How the farmers in the former Hacienda Luisita can further empower themselves through their self-organizing and education in sustainable development can yield rich lessons for other farmers in agrarian reform areas.