World Bank OKs $370 million land title facilitation loan

MANILA, Philippines — The World Bank Group has approved a $370 million loan for the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR)’s Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling Project (SPLIT), which is expected to help 750,000 individuals gain improved land tenure security and stable property rights.

In a statement, the World Bank said its board of executive directors has approved the $370 million for the DAR’s SPLIT program, which is designed to accelerate the subdivision of collective certificates of land ownership award and generate individual titles for over 1.3 million awarded under Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

“Many farmers who were granted lands under the country’s agrarian reform program have been waiting for individual titles, sometimes for decades,” said Achim Fock, World Bank acting country director for Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.

“This project will provide them the opportunity, on a voluntary basis, to get legal proof and the security of individual land rights. We expect that this will encourage them to invest in their property and adopt better technologies for greater productivity and higher incomes,”he said.

Fock emphasized that improved land tenure security would contribute to poverty reduction and rural economic growth and strengthen farmers’ resilience against the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19 outbreak.

“Due to the economic slowdown, subsistence farmers are at a significant risk of falling deeper into poverty,” Fock said, adding that “many of them lack social security, savings, and access to formal financing. With individual land titles, beneficiaries will have greater access to credit and financing, as well as government assistance.”

The Philippines has an extensive history of inequitable land tenure beginning in the Spanish colonial period from 1565-1898, wherein large private estates dominated the rural landscape. Farmers cultivated the land under share-cropping arrangements, with neither freedom to choose the crops they grew, nor the option to own the land they tilled.

By 1980, 60 percent of the agricultural population was landless, many of them poor. To rectify this pervasive land tenure inequality, Congress passed the agrarian reform law in 1988 and implemented the CARP to improve the lives of small farmers by offering them land tenure security and support services.