THE labor group Anakpawis on Thursday welcomed President-elect Rodrigo Duterte’s plan to review the expired Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program to determine if the lives of the farmer-beneficiaries had improved or if their land was taken back by landowners.
Rep. Fernando Hicap dismissed CARP as “a gigantic failure” because it squandered public funds and was used as a milking cow by the landowners.
“The 42-year implementation of Marcos PD 27 and Cory Aquino’s CARP obviously did not [save] the Filipino farmers from poverty,” Hicap said.
“Worse, they even fell victims to the violent attacks of the landowners and the government when they asserted their rights to land.”
Hicap made his statement even as incoming Agrarian Reform secretary Rafael Mariano said the farmers’ group Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas will convene on June 27 to look into the liability of President Benigno Aquino III and Budget Secretary Florencio Abad for allegedly paying Hacienda Luisita P471 million from the funds of the Disbursement Acceleration Program.
At a forum at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City, Mariano said he will take part in next week’s convention to discuss actions on the payment scheme carried out by the Aquino administration to the Cojuangco-owned Hacienda Luisita as KMP national president.
“KMP will decide on what to do. Our leaders will announce the decision,” he told The Standard.
He will pass on the filing of the cases against Aquino and Abad to the next leaders of their group since he will be assuming his next job as Agrarian Reform chief on June 30.
Citing data from the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council, Hicap said the combined public expenditure of Presidential Decree 27 and CARP from 1972 to 2007 reached to P289 billion, with the bulk of it or P233 billion alloted to land acquisition and distribution.
On the other hand, Hicap said, the compensation to landowners reached P81 billion or almost 30 percent while support to farmers reached only P52 billion or 20 percent.
Another set of data says the CARP’s implementation used up P244 billion, with Land Tenure Improvement using up P154 billion, with the compensation to landowners reaching P63 billion or more than a quarter of the total. Support to farmers reached only P30 billion, Hicap said.
“The budgetary cost of these programs and the reality that farmers remained landless are indisputable facts that they were a sham, hence the question of whether the farmers sold land upon award becomes petty as the programs’ framework doomed them to fail.”
Meanwhile, the Anakpawis party-list group pushed for the investigation of the massive cancellation of certificates of land ownership awards, certificate of land transfer and emancipation patents during the 16th Congress with House Resolution 914.
“We are concerned with the conscious effort of DAR officials to conceal the real status of canceled award certificates,” Hicap said.
“We have demanded the data annually during budget deliberations, but they had the gall to ignore our legislative inquiry. We totally support the President-elect’s statement to review the implementation of CARP and are confident that its bankruptcy would be put to light.”