Short answer. Article 7 of the Labor Code explains that agrarian reform exists because the old concept of land ownership by a few had spawned valid and legitimate grievances, leading to conflict and social tension. The law's declared purpose was to address that unrest by beginning reform with the emancipation of the tiller of the soil from his bondage.
What the law says
the old concept of land ownership by a few has spawned valid and legitimate grievances
Labor Code, Article 7 — Objectives Of Agrarian Reform. Read the full provision →
What the law says
the emancipation of the tiller of the soil from his bondage
Labor Code, Article 7 — Objectives Of Agrarian Reform. Read the full provision →
The grievance the provision responds to
The Labor Code frames land reform as a response to decades of unrest. It states that the old concept of land ownership by a few has spawned valid and legitimate grievances that gave rise to violent conflict and social tension, and that redressing those grievances was one of the fundamental objectives of the government of that period.
This is presented as background explaining why land redistribution became a state priority rather than being left to private arrangements between landlords and tenants.
What emancipation of the tenant farmer means
The provision describes the goal as the emancipation of the tiller of the soil from his bondage. In practice this meant freeing farmers who worked land owned by someone else from a tenancy arrangement that kept them dependent, by eventually transferring ownership of the land they tilled to them.
Because tenants often had no ownership stake in the land they cultivated, they remained economically dependent on landowners for their livelihood. The law treated ending that dependence, not simply improving tenancy terms, as the starting point for broader reform.
A statement of purpose, not a set of rules
Article 7 does not itself fix prices, deadlines or procedures. It is a declaration of intent that introduces the agrarian reform articles that follow in the Labor Code, including the provisions on how the price of transferred land is computed and how a tenant-farmer pays for it over time.
Read on its own, the article gives no timeline, valuation method or enforcement mechanism. Those mechanics were spelled out in the articles that came after it, which this provision exists to justify and introduce.
Why the reasoning still matters
Anyone researching how a particular agrarian land arrangement is supposed to work benefits from starting here, since the operative provisions were written to carry out this stated objective rather than to stand as unrelated technical rules.
Knowing the underlying purpose also helps explain why the specific rules on land valuation and payment were designed the way they were, since a rule that might otherwise look arbitrary, such as spreading payments over time rather than demanding a lump sum, makes more sense once it is read as a deliberate effort to make land ownership actually reachable for a tenant who had little capital of his own.
How this connects to the land-value rules
The Labor Code carries this statement of objectives together with specific agrarian articles, including the provision on how much a tenant-farmer must pay for land transferred to him. Reading them together shows how the broad goal of ending tenancy translated into a concrete formula for price and payment. Without the declaration of purpose in Article 7, that payment formula could be read as an ordinary commercial pricing rule; read alongside it, the formula instead appears as a mechanism built specifically to make emancipation from tenancy financially achievable for the farmers it was meant to benefit.
Related provisions
- Labor Code, Article 7 — Objectives Of Agrarian Reform
- Labor Code, Article 9 — How Land Value Is Computed