No Applause for a Stolen Century
(Or: "How Del Monte Made Exploitation Appears Benevolent")
by Salvador Del Monte
One must refuse to believe the landowners’ oldest refrain—that farmers already receive what they deserve. It is a line repeated so often it has begun to sound like truth, but it isn’t. The injustice is obvious, even without theory or rhetoric: the land is held by corporations and landlords, not by the people who till it. That single fact gives the lie away.
In the case of Del Monte, the contradiction is especially stark. The company insists it provides for the needs of farmworkers—employment, assistance, development—yet it continues to seize, consolidate, and control lands that rightfully belong to farmers and indigenous communities. This is not support. It is exploitation, carefully packaged as corporate benevolence. It is land grabbing with a polished smile and a well-funded public relations machine.
When the bluntness of History strips away the gloss.
What multinational agribusiness did in the Philippines was not the abolition of landlordism, but its reinvention.
Del Monte’s Philippine story begins in the 1920s, when pineapple estates expanded into one of the world’s largest integrated plantation systems. They consider the fertile land of the south as better than that of Hawaii: rich, volcanic, suitable for plantation farming that only benfited the few in the guise of agricultural-based countrside development. That expansion required land—lots of it—and much of it came from peasant communities and Lumad territories. What followed was a familiar export-oriented monocrop model: chemical-intensive farming, tight corporate control, and a labor regime designed to keep costs down and voices quiet.
Old feudal relations were “managerialized,” reshaped to serve capitalist expansion. When Luis “Moro” Lorenzo took over local operations from the Americans, Del Monte did not become less extractive—it became more efficient. Expansion accelerated. Control deepened. And other than pineapples, partner-plantations like Lapanday farms (that also acquired by Lorenzo from the Ayala and Aboitiz) were drawn into Del Monte’s supply chain, producing bananas for export, and that same Lapanday remains notorious for land grabbing and the exploitation of its workers.
However, the Lorenzos eventually replaced by the Camposes, who also owned another food conglomerate NutriAsia. In 2018, NutriAsia workers protesting contractualization were violently dispersed by company security and police in Marilao, Bulacan. Hundreds of outsourced workers had walked out over decades of insecurity and illegal termination. Different factory. Same playbook.
Different era. Same structure. Same victims.
From the distance of a glossy anniversary brochure, the plantations of Bukidnon and Misamis Oriental look like green prosperity stretching to the horizon. Up close, they look different: barbed-wire boundaries cutting through ancestral memory, rivers dulled by runoff, communities living with soldiers where there should have been schools, clinics, and peace.
But does this end the problem of food security? Social justice? And development in the countryside? The actions rather showed a tangible kind of pretension. Agrarian reform was supposed to change that, but, as minocrop-based plantation systems were presented as "keys to countryside development" this made landlords shifted from subsistence to cash crops particularly prior to passage of PD27 during the Marcos era.
Even the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program pushed many beneficiaries into leasing arrangements and long-term “contract growing agreements” stacked in favor of agribusiness. Production decisions, pricing, and risk flowed upward; precarity flowed down. In 2019, a Global Witness investigation pointed to Del Monte’s commercial ties with landholders and public officials accused of land grabbing and intimidation.
The company denied wrongdoing. The conflicts remained.
In 2017, Lumad leader Renato Anglao was shot dead on his way home with his wife and child in Quezon, Bukidnon. Anglao was Manobo–Pulangihon, a defender of ancestral land long threatened by encroachment and plantation expansion. His killing did not happen in a vacuum. It landed in a decade-spanning pattern of harassment, red-tagging, and violence against indigenous peoples and peasant leaders whose lands stood inconveniently in the way of “development.”
That same year, Mindanao went under Martial Law. From 2017 to 2018, communities in Bukidnon and Misamis Oriental—areas where Del Monte operates—reported threats, illegal arrests, indiscriminate firing, bombings, and repeated evacuations. When Executive Order 70 folded counterinsurgency into civilian governance in 2019, the pressure intensified. The message was clear: dissent would be treated as enemy action. Land defense became a liability. Survival became resistance.
Fast-forward to the present track, and the needle hasn’t lifted. Under the Marcos administration, militarization continues. In 2024, KMU labor organizer William Lariosa was forcibly taken by soldiers in Quezon, Bukidnon. Different decade, same refrain.
Even the environment was also affected by this explotative venture. In 2008, when the Princess of the Stars ferry sank, it was carrying ten tons of the toxic pesticide endosulfan bound for Del Monte plantations—despite restrictions on transporting such chemicals on passenger vessels. Hundreds died. Accountability dissolved into the sea.
To sum it all, the legacy rings hollow. The land on which its plantations stand was not freely given or innocently acquired—it was taken, that its people exploited. And a century later, the consequences remain. Communities are displaced. Farmers labor on land that once sustained their families. Crops are grown for foreign markets while food insecurity persists at home. No amount of "social responsibility" or its old term, "benevolent paternalism" addresses the core problem: a plantation model built on contested land, enforced by militarization, sustained by precarious labor, and paid for by ecosystems that do not recover on a quarterly schedule.
Foreign agribusiness prospers. Farmers are told to be patient.
The insult deepens when gratitude is demanded. Imagine being robbed of your house, then being told to thank the thieves for “allowing” you to stay. That is the logic being sold as development. It is not generosity. It is coercion wrapped in courtesy.
The centennial narrative asks the public to admire longevity and forget the cost. But memory is not so easily erased. Farmers remember. Indigenous peoples remember. Workers remember. Beneath the celebratory slogans lies a long record of dispossession, repression, and resistance.
There is nothing progressive about a plantation system built on stolen land and cheap labor. There is nothing sustainable about export-oriented monocropping that undermines local food security. And there is nothing worthy of celebration in a hundred years of injustice rebranded as success.
The demand remains unchanged, as urgent now as it was decades ago: genuine land reform, the return of land to those who till it, and an end to the exploitation of farmers and workers.
Until that happens, a centennial is not a milestone—it is a reminder.