Wasted opportunity: DAR to recall, reallocate farm lots that farmer-beneficiaries sold or abandoned
A good chunk of the farm lots that has been awarded to farmers in Batangas, Cavite, Cebu, Mindoro, and Misamis Oriental could be recalled and reallocated to other beneficiaries once proven that the agricultural lands were either sold or abandoned.

The Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) had apparently learned that 34 percent of the farm lots awarded to the agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) have ended up "either sold due to poverty or abandoned as the farm lots are far from the beneficiaries’ residences."
Agrarian Undersecretary Carim Panumpang said the agency may consider conducting inclusion and exclusion proceedings to recall the farm lots from undeserving beneficiaries and "reallocate the farm lots to the deserving ones."
The validation of distributed lands is carried out around the country to "assess the realities on the ground vis-à-vis the distributed certificates of land ownership awards" and to find out the real score of the country's Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).
"We need to know whether our beneficiaries are still in possession of the farm lots awarded to them, had transferred them to their heirs by way of succession, or sold them already to the third parties," Panumpang said.
The DAR needs concrete proof as to where the CARP stands now after more than 30 years of implementation, the undersecretary stressed.
The CARP was launched in 1988, 16 years after the implementation of Presidential Decree (PD) No. 27, also known as the "Operation Land Transfer."
Meanwhile, the department will begin the conduct of land title validation in Nueva Vizcaya on July 12.