MANILA — Armed men opened fire on a group of sugar cane farmers who were occupying part of a plantation in the central Philippines, killing nine, and then set three of the bodies on fire, the police said on Sunday.

Four other farmers, two of them minors, survived the attack late Saturday on a plantation outside the city of Sagay in Negros Occidental Province and were under police protection as commandos pursued the attackers, the police said.

Those who were killed were members of a farmers’ union, the National Federation of Sugarcane Workers, who began occupying the area over the weekend as part of a campaign to begin cultivating land covered by a government agrarian overhaul, the police said. The state program, which dates to the 1980s, calls for redistributing private and public agricultural land to independent small farmers.

The vacant plot they had occupied belongs to Hacienda Nene, a vast sugar cane plantation, which has been subject to the government land program, rights workers and the farmers’ group said.