Sen. Francis N. Pangilinan, warning over the weekend that nearly 100,000 hectares of agricultural lands are no longer producing food since 1988, asked the Duterte government to stop land conversion schemes to “save farming and farmlands.”
At the same time, Pangilinan prodded Congress to frontload the passage of the proposed Agricultural Land Conversion Ban Act embodied in his Senate Bill (SB) 256.
Pangilinan pointed out in the bill that since agrarian reform was implemented from 1988 to 2016, at least 97,592.5 hectares of what used to be farmlands he estimated to be the combined size of Metro Manila and Cebu City are no longer producing basic food supplies.
To ensure that Filipino farmers are able to produce adequate supply of food for the country, Pangilinan pressed the government to promptly stop “unbridled conversion of agricultural land into residential, commercial, industrial and other nonagricultural uses.”
Stressing that “we need farmers to feed the country [and] farmers need farmlands to feed the country,” Pangilinan pinpointed rapid urbanization and population growth as contributors to the problem of shrinking agricultural lands, adding: “Pinapanukala nating protektahan ang mga lupang sakahan na ginastusan na ng gobyerno sa patubig [Our proposal is to protect farmlands that were irrigated using government money.]”
He explained that the urgently needed remedial legislation aims “to protect farmlands for which government already spent to irrigate,” clarifying that the Senate bill “seeks to preserve irrigated and irrigable lands for the country’s food security.”
To drive home his point, the senator also cited data to show that Luzon suffers most from massive land conversion, making up 80.6 percent of the entire country’s approved land conversions; Visayas, 7.8 percent; and Mindanao, 11.6 percent.
According to Pangilinan, “the additional requirement before the grant of a conversion permit is to ensure the suitability of the conversion of an agriculture lot. This is timely due to the unbridled land conversion, legal or otherwise,” said the senator, who owns a small vegetable farm in Cavite.
The Pangilinan bill, once passed into law, will amend Section 20 of the Local Government Code, requiring additional approval from the Departments of Agriculture (DA), Agrarian Reform (DAR), and Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), as well as local government units before land reclassification and conversion.
As proposed in the bill, conversion of agricultural lands requires the following certifications from the following agencies:
the DA indicating: the total area of existing agricultural land; that such lands are not included among those classified for conversion or reclassification under an existing law (AO 20, series of 1992); and, that the land has ceased to be economically feasible for agricultural purposes;
the DAR indicating that such lands are not distributed or programmed for distribution to agrarian reform beneficiaries; and,
the DENR indicating that the proposed reclassification is ecologically sound.
Pangilinan’s bill also cited studies indicating that agriculture takes a back seat among other land development projects, as it has the smallest return on investment.
“Ang ibig sabihin nito, kailangan nating punan ang pagsasaka para maging kaakit-akit na pagkakakitaan, dahil kailangan nating lahat ng pagkain para mabuhay [This means that we need to make farming an attractive enterprise, because we all need food to live],” the senator said.