Lawmaker denies opposing Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program

MANILA, Philippines - Negros Occidental Rep. Alfredo Benitez said yesterday militant groups could have all the tracts of agricultural land they claim his family owns and supposedly covered under the agrarian reform law.

Benitez issued the statement as various militant farmer groups sought to have him investigated by the House ethics committee for allegedly opposing the bill extending the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

“If they find any land that’s under my family’s name that has not been covered by land reform law, they could have it,” Benitez, leader of the Visayan bloc in the House of Representatives, said.

The lawmaker said he was not opposing the bill extending CARP but actually pushing for the completion of the program that covers land that has not been distributed to farmers in the last three decades.

He said the CARP has ended and there is no law covering transactions and other actions involving lands that should have been acted upon by the program.