Thursday, May 8, 2008 [ philstar.com ]
Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr. is seeking a full accounting of the tens of billions of pesos spent for the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) since it was first implemented in 1988 in view of allegations about corruption and misuse of money.
At the same time, he said the issue of funding should be resolved first before Congress could decide on the extension of CARP which expires on June 10.
Pimentel said there had been no accounting of the public money allocated for CARP, including the P28 billion from the Marcos bank deposits recovered from Switzerland.
He said the administration had not yet fully responded to the allegations by farmers’ organizations that part of the recovered Marcos bank deposits had been diverted to the 2004 election campaign of President Arroyo.
“We have to ascertain that public funds that were appropriated for CARP are duly accounted for. And we do not see that yet because every time the CARP is in danger of extinction, they just come back to say we need more money to keep CARP alive,” he said.
Pimentel said that during the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines-Legislators’ forum which he attended, it was revealed that the Supreme Court had upheld a lower court decision to pay a huge landowner P1 billion as just compensation for a tract of land covered by CARP.
He said the Supreme Court, in two separate cases, also ordered the payment of P1 billion to one corporate landowner and P122 million to another.
“This is terrible. With that kind of money being paid to big landowners, how can you sustain the CARP?” Pimentel said.
The concept of just compensation must be different for the agrarian reform program as compared with the just compensation requirement of expropriating private land for public use and ordinary commercial land transactions, he said.
Pimentel suspected that the payment of unusually huge amounts of compensation to certain landowners was the product of “sweetheart deals” that had been entered into between some public officials and the landowners.
He said there “is an emerging consensus” among legislators to pass the law to extend the CARP but the Senate, in particular, could not act speedily on the bill because a lot of information remained missing.
“I think the senators are also pragmatic in the sense that they understand that this program has to go on. But as I said the presentation of information on CARP is not yet complete,” Pimentel said.
He said at this time it was not clear where the government would get the P162 billion that the Department of Agrarian Reform wanted to continue and complete the CARP.
Pimentel said the funding issue would need a redefinition of “just compensation” for private agricultural lands that were compulsorily covered by CARP or voluntarily sold to the government for redistribution to farmer-beneficiaries.
“Of what use is the extension of the CARP law if there is no funding? The funding issue is very important and that is anchored on what the term ‘just compensation’ means,” Pimentel said.
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