The Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) and Department of Agriculture (DA) are working together to enroll some 1.2 million agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) to the Registry System for Basic Sector in Agriculture (RSBSA).
An electronic compilation of basic information of farmers, fishermen and agri-fishery workers, and target-beneficiary programs and services of the government, the registry will serve as a basic requirement in availing of agri-fishery related government services of the DA, its bureaus and agencies, and corporations.
In a news statement, DAR Undersecretary for Support Services Office Atty. Emily O. Padilla said “the two national agencies have agreed to strengthen their collaboration for the massive enrollment of the ARBs to the DA’s database system on basic information of farmers and farm parcels through identification, application, enrollment, and field validation.”
Enrolling farmers, including the ARBs, into the RSBSA, would enable them to avail themselves of government assistance, such as those being offered by the Philippine Crop Insurance Assistance (PCIA) and the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund (RCEF).
Padilla lauded the DA for taking the initiative of conferring with and requesting the Philippine Crop Insurance Corporation (PCIC) to consider the officially submitted list of ARBs in its insurance coverage while the system upgrading for the RSBSA is being completed.
This as the DAR regional directors have already been instructed to pursue vigorously the RSBSA registration in their respective areas, taking into consideration the precautionary measures being undertaken against the contagious coronavirus 2019, or Covid-19, Padilla said.
During her meetings with DA officials, Padilla learned that the primary reason for the delay in the enrollment of some 1.2 million ARBs is the field validation, which is considered a tedious process resulting to lower ARB outreach.
“It turned out that the list of ARBs that the DAR submitted to the DA is not automatically included but is still subject for field validation,” Padilla said.
She added that the RSBSA registration forms that were manually filled out by the ARBs are still being encoded.
Furthermore, the clients’ copies of the filled out RSBSA forms do not indicate if the enrollees are covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, she said.
Jonathan L. Mayuga
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