Pambansang Kilusan ng mga Samahang Magsasaka (PAKISAMA) traces its roots to the series of grassroots consultation conducted in 1986, right after the EDSA People Power Revolution. It was conducted in 70% of the provinces in the country and participated in by more than 10,000 peasant leaders. It aimed at formulating a genuine agrarian and aquatic reform program. It was in this series of grassroots consultation and in the culminating national consultation held in August 1986 that the need for a strong national alliance that will push for genuine agrarian and aquatic reform, rural development, and the protection of peasants’ rights was recognized. The participating peasant groups as a response to this need organized the PAKISAMA.

PAKISAMA since 1986 was prominent in several national and international campaigns for agrarian reform and rural development. After a successful campaign with the broadest coalition of national farmers federations and civil society organizations in enacting the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) in 1988 to cover 10 million hectares of agricultural land for distribution to some 7 million farmers, PAKISAMA in 1989 pioneered and eventually mainstreamed in 1992 the Tripartite Partnership for Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (TriPARRD) Program. The program mobilized agrarian reform farmers with key national NGOs, academe, and government agencies in all stages of agrarian reform implementation including a systematic development of agrarian reform community cooperatives in full value-chain services to members, enhancing their capacity to produce better and healthier crops and livestocks through the practice of integrated, diversified, organic farming systems, processing them to add value, and to gain greater market power.