1 million farmers to get land titles under CARP

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) has launched a P24.6-billion project which aims to subdivide 1.3 million hectares of agricultural land for the benefit of one million agrarian reform beneficiaries.In a virtual launching ceremony yesterday, Agrarian Reform Secretary John Castriciones said the project, dubbed Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling or SPLIT, was designed to “uplift the economic lives of farmers” through improved land tenure security and continued financial and technical assistance from the government and private sector.

Castriciones said the project targets the issuance of individual land titles to a total of 1,140,735 beneficiaries by parcelizing 1,368,883 hectares of agricultural land covered by collective certificates of land ownership (CLOAs) under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

The funding for the project will be sourced from a loan grant from the World Bank amounting to P19.24 billion and a P5.3-billion allocation from the national government.

The project will be implemented in 78 provinces in Calabarzon, Southern Tagalog and Cagayan.

Based on DAR’s record, 4.8 million hectares of land have been awarded to beneficiaries since the CARP was implemented in 1988.

At least 1.3 million hectares were awarded through collective CLOAs.

“These collective CLOAs were issued by past administrations maybe because they wanted to speed up the awarding of land to the agrarian reform beneficiaries. But a collective CLOA usually becomes a source of disputes among farmers,” Castriciones said.