Thursday, April 24, 2008 [ philstar.com ]
The House committee on agrarian reform endorsed yesterday the extension for five years of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).
The committee approved a bill seeking the extension of the program, which expires on June 30 this year.
The CARP extension was one of the priority bills that members of Congress and President Arroyo agreed on during the Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council meeting in Malacañang last Tuesday.
Catholic bishops had earlier called on lawmakers to give the program a few more years so that sugar lands could be distributed to farmers.
Rep. Risa Hontiveros of the party-list group Akbayan, one of the proponents of the CARP extension, said there are at least 1.2 million hectares of private agricultural lands that are still not distributed.
“Allowing CARP to die without fulfilling its promises of social justice and emancipation would be the height of injustice,” she said.
She revealed that among the private landholdings covered by CARP which have not been distributed to their tenants are six haciendas owned by the family of President Arroyo’s husband Jose Miguel Arroyo in Negros Occidental.
“Eight years ago, the President promised to put these haciendas under CARP. Three of these have avoided CARP through land conversion and other means,” she added.
She pointed out that Hacienda Bacan has been converted into agro-industrial use for the production of ethanol, while Hacienda Grande has been subdivided and titled to several corporations, individuals and foundations.
“The last of the three plantations, Hacienda Paraiso, was subdivided into parcels of five hectares, a sly if not silly attempt to evade the law,” Hontiveros said.
She stressed that the planned law extending CARP should prohibit such maneuvers.
The late President Ferdinand Marcos started the agrarian reform program by mandating the distribution of rice lands under Presidential Decree 27. The law was later amended to include sugar lands.
Aside from extending CARP, lawmakers are considering a measure that would require banks to accept titles issued to agrarian reform beneficiaries as loan collateral.
At present, such titles are considered worthless scraps of paper by banks.
Meanwhile, a veteran legislator wants the House of Representatives to first conduct an extensive review of the benefits of CARP before it is extended, especially because the government spent P130 billion for the program.
Cebu Rep. Pablo Garcia said the public should be apprised of what the 20-year-old law has brought, whether it achieved its objective to improve agricultural productivity, reduce poverty and enhance the lives of farmers, farm-workers and promote rural development.
Created under Republic Act 6675, CARP was supposed to be implemented for 10 years but Garcia said DAR failed to meet the deadline in 1998. Later, the DAR again sought and was granted an extension until 2008 under RA 8532.
“Now, it appears that DAR will fail again to meet this deadline. So DAR, after two failures, is now asking for another extension. As a friend of mine put it: This is truly one of those very rare instances where a program’s failure is used to justify its continuation,” Garcia said.
He said a study conducted by DAR and GTZ or German Technical Corp. indicated that despite more than 20 years of agrarian reform, it has failed to significantly reduce rural poverty levels and raise agricultural productivity.
During yesterday’s House hearing on the proposed CARP extension, party-list Rep. Crispin Beltran of Anakpawis said the poor beneficiaries of CARP could no longer afford the expensive maintenance of their lands to produce rice and other food products, the reason why they just abandon them.
“And that is one of the main reasons why the price of rice is high,” he said. – With Delon Porcalla, Christina Paguinto, Jose Miguel Reyes
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