CARP Extension?
As CARP approaches its deadline next year, a great debate is taking place in Congress for its extension.
Partylist Rep. Rafael Mariano pronounced it as a total failure and said his group has filed a bill in Congress that will distribute lands to farmers at no cost at all. He said such a bill will hopefully present an alternative to the farmers’ continued landlessness after 19 years of CARP.
DAR claimed to have distributed 209,938 hectares of the 227, 065 hectares targeted for distribution in Southern Mindanao as of September this year. DAR claimed to have distributed 64 per cent of its target for this year.
But Mariano described the DAR report as inaccurate, unreliable, questionable and bloated.
He said that the 3.8 million hectares that DAR claimed to have distributed to more than 2.1 farmers as of June this year, are “problematic” and did not include lands that were taken away from farmer beneficiaries for one reason or another. “Practically, the farmer has no guarantee that the land awarded to him will not be taken away; and that land has always been under threat of confiscation,” he said.
“DAR is saying that they have already solved several land- related cases, but are these solved cases final and executory or are just solved only in the administrative level?” Mariano asked.
He said that after almost 20 years of CARP, a huge portion of the so-called big agricultural lands remains outside the coverage of CARP.
He added that the Hacienda Luisita owned by the Cojuangco’s was put under CARP but up to this time there is no physical distribution to the many peasants in Tarlac.
The Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill is meant to totally distribute lands to the peasants to “free the farmers from all forms of exploitation,” Mariano said, although, he admitted that such a bill may face a hard sailing in Congress, where big landlords dominate.
“Knowing the ‘class character’ of the landlords who are majority in the congress,” Mariano said, “We don’t expect this bill to be popular,” he said. He said that breaking the land monopoly which is the source of the political and economic power of the landlords may still take a long time to materialize.
But Inson said DAR is pining for the extension of CARP because there are still lands pending for distribution. He also said that DAR will need additional budget to implement the law.
“The Agrarian Reform Program is a law and remains to be law, but if the congress will not give the budget, how can they expect the employees to come back and continue their work?” he asked.
Pojas said the CARP extension goes beyond land distributions and the interests of multinational and transnational companies are the ones given consideration by the government. In the Southern Mindanao region alone, the companies are eyeing 5,000 to 5, 500 hectares of land for new banana plantation, on top of the existing 45,000 hectares, where banana plantations operate in the region.
“The proposal to extend CARP for another ten years is illogical when the actual results of its implementation for the past 19 years only show the paltry, if not token, land distribution from small to medium landowners. At any rate CARP is useless and no amount of time can prove its benefit for the Filipino farmers,” Pojas ends. (Grace Uddin/davaotoday.com)
Land Reform
