Negros landlords continue to profit from the landholdings that have been covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) because of delays in the program’s implementation, the group Task Force Mapalad (TFM) alleged on Wednesday.
For the same reasons, thousands of farmers who were supposed to benefit from these CARP-covered lands lose a potential income of the same amount based on a study conducted by the group.
According to the group’s study, at least P6.9 billion annually or a total of P32.75 billion of farmers’ potential net income had been lost for the last five years that the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) failed to award to CARP beneficiaries a total of 3,020 farms in Negros Occidental with a total land area of 69,217 hectares comprising mostly of private sugar plantations.
The 3,020 landholdings were among the Negros farms that the TFM petitioned to be covered by the CARP days before June 30, 2014, or the time of the expiry of Republic Act (RA) 9700 that funds the program’s land acquisition and distribution phase.
TFM computed the income loss by multiplying the 69,217 hectares of undistributed landholdings with the estimated P99,616 average yearly net profit per hectare in the first three years of sugar farming that a CARP beneficiary could have earned if he or she already owned the land and productively using it even without government support services.
The result was then multiplied with the number of years that the DAR failed to distribute the landholdings from June 2014 to March 2019, or a total of 4.75 years.
The group is now appealing to President Duterte to cause the distribution of these lands.
“Even before you started office in 2016, you already promised that you would be a pro-poor and anti-oligarchic leader. Last month, while you were in Sagay City, you said that CARP ‘is the law, and I will implement the law.’ Thank you for being consistent [with] your statements, Mr. President. Now, please help us stop our economic bleeding. Please fast-track and complete land distribution, and put an end to DAR policies killing CARP,” Teresita Tarlac, president of TFM Negros-Panay Chapter said in a news statement.
“With those huge amounts, thousands of mouths would have been fed, thousands of children would have been provided with better education, thousands of farmers would have been freed from their slave-like work under greedy hacienderos. But these aren’t happening. Many of us are dying old and poor even when the solution, which is CARP, is obviously there,” Tarlac added.
Since June 2014, or nearly five years later after RA 9700’s expiry, most of these landholdings comprising 69,217 hectares are nowhere near the land distribution stage of CARP, the group lamented.
According to TFM, nearly 80 percent of the total area of the farms or 54,630 hectares was stuck in the first step of the land acquisition and distribution process or has not yet advanced to any LAD stage as of March 2019.
Sixty-two percent of the farms comprising 42,963 hectares (2,020 farms) are still at the notice of CARP coverage (NOC) stage—the very first step in the LAD—while 17 percent or 11,667 hectares (375 farms) have not yet been issued any NOC and, thus, have not yet reached even the first LAD step.
It takes 27 LAD steps for the DAR, with the help of the LandBank of the Philippines (LBP), as the financial intermediary for the CARP, to acquire a farm from a landowner and distribute it to the farmer-beneficiaries through certificates of land ownership award (CLOA).
Among the major LAD steps are the DAR’s issuance of NOC, informing a landowner that his or her land is being placed under CARP; selection of qualified CARP beneficiaries; a land survey identifying which parts of the land are CARPable; preparation of the claim folders of farmer-beneficiaries; the LBP’s determination of the value of the land and depositing of the landowner’s compensation in exchange for the acquisition of his or her land under CARP; the DAR’s immediate possession of the land; the Registry of Deeds’ (ROD) cancellation of the landowner’s title and the issuance of a new one under the name of the Republic of the Philippines; and finally the generation and distribution of CLOAs to CARP beneficiaries.