Farmers to receive over 400K hectares of subdivided arable land—DAR
By Jel Santos
The Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) said it will soon distribute over 400,000 hectares of agricultural lands to farmer-beneficiaries through the Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT) project.

Agrarian Reform Secretary Conrado Estrella III said they have so far subdivided 437,922 hectares of arable lands which will be distributed to the same number of qualified farmer-beneficiaries.
The SPLIT project, he said, aims to subdivide the previously distributed 146,860 Collective Certificates of Land Ownership Award (CCLOAs) and turn them into individual land titles.
“The P24.62-billion project, funded by the World Bank and the government of the Philippines, aims to improve land tenure security and stabilize the property rights of some 1.14 million agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) covering 1.36 million hectares of land nationwide,” the DAR said in a statement.
Estrella said the majority of the CCLOAs distributed during the 1990s have already encountered a lot of changes, “in so far as the actual tillers and owners of the farmlands, and the current size of the landholdings.”
Engineer Joey Sumatra, DAR Assistant Secretary for Field Operations and SPLIT project national director, said approximately 30 percent of the ARBs listed in CCLOAs are no longer in the area where the landholdings are located, due to abandonment, death, or their rights having already been sold to other individuals.
“We have to undertake field validation process through the disqualification and reallocation proceedings to determine the qualified beneficiaries,” he said.
Sumatra said there is a need to resolve several issues, including overlapping issues between CARP-covered farmlands and indigenous communities' ancestral lands, land surveying to determine portions of landholdings already allocated for non-agricultural uses, and the process of generating electronic titles, among others.
Before determining the metes and bounds of each subdivided farm lot, he said that portions of landholdings allocated for non-agricultural uses, such as road networks and basic social facilities, must be separated.