The farmers’ group Task Force Mapalad on Tuesday urged the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR to expedite the acquisition of private agricultural land and complete land distribution under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).
Teresita Tarlac, Task Force Mapalad president, said despite several meetings and agreements, DAR failed to abide by its commitments under Republic Act Nos. 6657 and 9700, and Memorandum Circular No. 226 of 2023 mandating the continuation of the land acquisition and distribution process despite the protest of landowners.
The farmers lamented that the lack of funds for landowner compensation, resistance of landowners to the survey of landholdings and the filing of a variety of cases have impeded the conduct of surveys.
The task force said “it takes an eternity” for DAR to generate certificates of land ownership awards as landowners pursue their legal options.
Tarlac said the installation of farmers in a big landholding in Negros Occident is long overdue.
She complained that the government has already settled the compensation to the landowner but DAR has failed to install the farmer-beneficiaries.
With the enactment of a law that condoned the loan amortizations of over 600,000 agrarian reform beneficiaries and the order for DAR to expedite the World Bank-funded Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT) Project, or the distribution of individual land titles to farmers with collective CLOAs and resolve the “vintage” agrarian reform cases pending the DAR adjudication board, farmers should have received their land, according to Tarlac.
She said DAR records showed the government still has to distribute 173,340 hectares to the beneficiaries nationwide on top of the 147,378 hectares temporarily deleted from the land distribution list in March 2022 through Memorandum Circular No. 112.