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 agrarian change, land relations, and national development in the Philippines?

The project follows rice through the Central Luzon Rice Corridor (CLRC)—a contiguous formation linking Nueva Ecija (production), Bulacan (milling and storage), Metro Manila (primary import entry point), and Pampanga-Tarlac (sites of infrastructure development and agrarian contestation). Following rice through these sites reveals how the Philippine state manages the agrarian question spatially: through rice liberalization that exposes farmers to volatile global markets; land reclassification that converts farmland for commercial and infrastructure use; and elite-led infrastructure projects built on former U.S. military bases that reconfigure rural and urban space. These strategies displace agrarian demands while deepening import dependency and reinforcing disarticulated, externally-oriented development.

The project develops Following Rice as Method, a grain-level approach that emerged directly from preliminary fieldwork with farmers and peasant organizers. After initially asking questions about neoliberalism and globalization, I found those abstractions did not resonate. Instead, farmers and organizers redirected concretely: where rice now comes from, which port it arrives at, who buys it, who controls warehouses and mills, and why that matters. Rather than imposing ready-made theoretical frameworks from classrooms in the Global North, I learned to follow rice across its circuits of production, circulation, and consumption.

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 engages recent work on logistics and infrastructure (Chua, Khalili) to understand how peripheral states spatially manage agrarian crises. Analysis is grounded in Filipino epistemologies: kapwa (shared identity), pakikiisa (solidarity), kwentuhan (storytelling as method), and gawaing masa (mass work).

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.

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, I argue that rather than resolving the agrarian question, the Philippine state disperses 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 and CASER. It illuminates patterns visible across the Global South: how peripheral states manage agrarian crises through spatial strategies amid intensifying climate vulnerabilities.

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 12 months of sustained dissertation fieldwork planned for 2026-2027.

Methods

My research engages agrarian political economy, critical development studies, historical materialism, and decolonial methodologies, foregrounding visual ethnography and photography as central modes of inquiry. The methodological approach combines:

Visual Ethnography and Photography Documentary photography as investigative method, visual documentation of landscapes, infrastructure, labor, and collective action, participatory visual research, archival image analysis.

Filipino Epistemologies and Ethnographic Methods: Multi-sited ethnography, Participatory Action Research, kwentuhan, gawaing masa.

Spatial Analysis and GIS: ArcGIS, ArcGIS StoryMaps, field mapping and visualization

Archival and Historical Methods:Critical discourse analysis, legal analysis, archival research across Philippine institutions

Public Scholarship and Community Engagement: Community exhibitions and screenings, podcast production, collaborative knowledge production.