Dissertation

Following Rice: Agrarian Transformation in the Central Luzon Rice Corridor
Ph.D. Dissertation (in progress)

This dissertation investigates the agrarian question in the Philippines through the political economy of rice. Once a net rice exporter in the early 1980s, the Philippines had, by 2008, become the world's largest rice importer. In 2019, the Rice Tariffication Law fundamentally restructured the rice economy, dismantling protections for domestic farmers and transferring control to private traders. This reversal drives the central inquiry: How did this transformation occur, and what does it reveal about land, labor, and sovereignty in a peripheral social formation?

The project argues that this transformation is not primarily a story of failed productivity. It reflects a reorganization of sovereignty within a peripheral social formation whose ruling bloc reproduces itself through integration, policy ‘common sense’, and institutional commitments conditioned by U.S.-led power in the modern world-system. Sovereignty here is not reducible to formal flag independence. Rather, it appears in competing forms: national-agrarian sovereignty rooted in land reform and production; surname sovereignty anchored in dynastic control over property and state institutions; and world-market sovereignty oriented toward liberalization, import dependence, and integration into U.S.-led circuits of accumulation. Rather than resolving the agrarian question through genuine land reform and national industrialization, the dominant development model governs crisis through the politics of import-led stability, land conversion instead of land reform, and corridor development that treats agrarian space as real estate, infrastructure, and investment terrain.

Theoretical Groundings

This project builds on Samir Amin’s theorization of the “new agrarian question”: what happens to billions in peripheral social formations as the productivity gap between Global North and South agriculture widens. It draws on Walter Rodney’s insistence that underdevelopment is not absence but a historical relationship structured through unequal exchange and imperial constraint. It also engages recent scholarship on logistics and infrastructure to understand how peripheral states spatially manage agrarian crises through corridors, zones, and circulation regimes. Analysis is grounded in Filipino epistemologies including kapwa, pakikiisa, kwentuhan, and gawaing masa, which shape how knowledge is produced and returned.

Rice Stripped of History

In dominant policy discourse, rice is stripped of history: detached from the land on which it is grown, abstracted from the property regimes that structure agrarian life, and severed from the class relations that shape rural reproduction. It appears as a technical problem of efficiency and price, and something that can be solved through scientific management.

As a wage good, cheap rice lowers the cost of reproducing labor power and makes depressed wages governable, allowing capital and the state to govern crisis through price rather than structural transformation, while the costs of agrarian transition are externalized onto farmers and rural communities.

This dissertation returns rice to history.

Following Rice as Method

Following Rice is both a research strategy and a methodological intervention. Rather than imposing abstract categories such as “globalization” or “neoliberalism,” this grain-level approach emerged directly from fieldwork with farmers and peasant organizers, who redirected analysis toward concrete questions: where rice now comes from, which port it arrives at, who controls warehouses and mills, how release timing affects price, and how land conversion reshapes agrarian life.

Like Sidney Mintz followed sugar, Sven Beckert followed cotton, and Allan Sekula followed ships, this project follows rice to understand the political economy of a peripheral social formation.

Research Questions

1. How did the Philippines shift from rice exporter in the 1980s to the world's top importer by 2008, and what historical processes produced this reversal?

2. How has the Philippine rice economy been reorganized after the 2019 Rice Tariffication Law, and how do stakeholders understand where value is now captured?

3. How does the Philippine state organize the spatial governance and infrastructure of rice and land amid agrarian transition in the Central Luzon Rice Corridor?

4. How do farmers and peasant movements theorize and contest these transformations, and what alternatives do they advance?

Across these questions, the project asks how the Philippine state has responded to the agrarian question. Rather than resolving it, how has the state dispersed it into the city, through overseas work, and into former rice lands now claimed for ‘development’?

This research challenges prevailing narratives that "there is no alternative" by documenting how movements articulate concrete liberation strategies—genuine agrarian reform and national industrialization through policies like RIDA (Rice Industry Development Act) and CASER.

Sites of Inquiry: The Central Luzon Rice Corridor

Fieldwork centers on what I call the Central Luzon Rice Corridor (CLRC): a contiguous cite that links Nueva Ecija, Bulacan, Metro Manila, Pampanga and Tarlac.

• Nueva Ecija anchors production as the country’s largest rice-producing region.

• Bulacan structures circulation through warehouses, mills, and trader credit.

• Metro Manila operates as price frontier and import entry point.

• Pampanga and Tarlac reveal land conversion, corridor development, and base transformation.

Methods

This dissertation combines socio-historical analysis, legal and policy research, ethnography, spatial mapping, and visual investigation.

Archival and historical analysis reconstructs the trajectory from the Green Revolution to the Rice Tariffication Law, tracing how key conjunctures reorganized agrarian governance. Legal and policy analysis examines agrarian reform statutes, trade agreements, and regulatory restructuring to understand how law stabilizes particular development pathways.

Ethnographic research includes interviews with farmers, organizers, traders, and policy actors across Central Luzon. Drawing on Filipino epistemologies such as kwentuhan and gawaing masa, the project treats knowledge as relational and situated.

Spatial and infrastructural analysis traces corridors, warehouses, ports, and land reclassification projects that reorganize agrarian space and circulation.

Visual political economy extends Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism into a visual and spatial method. Rice is treated not as a neutral object of market governance, but as a condensation of social relations. Images are sequenced analytically rather than illustratively, and captions name relations that technocratic discourse obscures. Through this practice, the project constructs a counter-archive of development that restores rice to history.

Public Scholarship and Collaborative Practice

This research is committed to collaborative knowledge production. Findings are shared through community exhibitions, screenings, and public presentations in the Philippines and the diaspora. Photography and podcast production operate not as supplements to scholarship but as modes of return and dialogue. Public engagement situates the dissertation within ongoing debates over land, sovereignty, and development, ensuring that research circulates beyond the academy.

Positionality

I am Filipino diaspora based in Los Angeles, with family roots in Pampanga, where my lolo and generations before him farmed rice until displacement from the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption and subsequent infrastructure projects. This research traces the processes of land loss and labor export that produced my own diasporic position, bringing the analysis home across generations.

Fieldwork Status

Based on preliminary fieldwork during summers 2024 and 2025, I have established partnerships with AMIHAN, KMP, and MASIPAG, conducting interviews with over 30 farmers across Luzon and Mindanao and documenting the 2025 PSONA mobilization of 15,000+ participants. The project includes (if I secure funding crosses fingers) 12 months of sustained dissertation fieldwork planned for 2026-2027.