DAR fixes trouble-causing glitch in land distribution to farmers; over 194,000 titles released under PBBM
The strategy implemented to expedite the distribution of lands to as many farmers under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) in the past administrations resulted in confusion and even violent disputes among the beneficiaries, the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) said.
DAR Secretary Conrado Estrella III said the confusion and disagreements among farmers was due to the collective Certificate of Land Ownership Awards (CLOAs) wherein several farmers were named as owners of land under one land title.
“In the desire to distribute land titles to as many farmers in the soonest possible time, they (past administrations) released a collective CLOA. That’s good but there was one important thing that they failed to do, the parcelization,” said Estrella.
As a result, the farmer-beneficiaries quarreled among themselves since there was no specific information as to what particular part of the land belonged to each of them.
Estrella said the confusion and disagreements among farmer-beneficiaries led to the coining of the term department of away (quarrel) and reklamo (complaints) to refer to the DAR.
He said this was one of the problems that the Marcos administration focused into since July 2022.
“So what we did was to secure a fund from the World Bank for the implementation of the SPLIT (Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling) program which is focused on the parcelization of the land for farmer-beneficiaries,” said Estrella.
And since July 2022, Estrella said they already distributed 132,393 e-titles equivalent to 170,718 hectares and benefitted over 124,000 farmers.
Under the regular land titling based through the Land Acquisition Division, he said a total of 61,718 land titles equivalent to 58,828 hectares.
“Under the administration of President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos, Jr., we already distributed 194,111 land titles which is equivalent to 229,545 hectares,” said Estrella.
He said the figure represents a 1,000 percent increase in the distribution of land titles and hectares of land compared to the previous administrations.
The specific data, however, is not immediately available.