Kasama System of Tenancy: The Land-Rice Nexus

The dominant system of tenancy before and after the Japanese Occupation was

generally known as the kasamahan system. The root word kasama is a Tagalog term for

“partner.” Thus kasamahan literally refers to a partnership but was often translated and

practiced as a form of share tenancy (or sharecropping). Kasamahan as an economic

partnership between the tenant (and his family) and the landowner, in a sense was a

patron-client relations where poor tenants seek the economic protection and support of a

rich landlord (Ramsey 1965, 65) and involved an ideology of mutual requirements of

capital and labor (Fegan 1982, 102). Although exploitative and usurious in nature, this

form of socioeconomic alliance between the two parties was part of the discursive

worldview of the period, hence unproblematic and believed to be part of the natural social

order.i

This ‘debt-patronage’ system (Lachica 1971, 59) was documented by an earlier

ethnographic account of Mullins (1913). This quite extended quote from his Economic

Conditions in the Philippines was necessary:

The owner furnishes the tenant with land, a carabao and seed, the product of

the crop to be equally divided between them after deducting the seed. Upon delivery

to the tenant of the animal he takes bugnas, advance money. This varies from P15 to

70 and forms a retainer, as it were, until the owner sees fit to release him and his

family…. Naturally as he lives from hand to mouth, he is without resources, except

cooking pots, a mat or so, and a few clothes. At the end of the week, usually on

Sunday, he draws a ration of palay from the owner, which varies, though usually a

half cavan a week is sufficient for his family. This amount he pays back in kind with
an increase upon gathering his crop, but all other supplies of money that are

generally drawn from time to time from the owner are paid for in takalanan- that is,

at the end of the season the tenant repays the landlord in palay at less than the

market value, say from P0.50 to P0.70, a cavan, a gain for the landowner from 150 to

200 percent.
i
Those interested in the historical evolution of the kasama system can read McLennan (1965).