Thursday, June 25, 2009

DAR-Zambosur’s feat on CARP

REPORT BY MICHAEL MEDINA

VOLUNTARY Land Transfer (VLT) composes the bulk of lots accomplished by the provincial office of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) for their land acquisition and distribution (LAD) under CARP for the period covering 1972 until Dec. 31, 2008.

CARP, acronym for Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, expired last June 10, 2008 and was recently extended by both the Senate and Congress through Senate Bill 2666 and House Bill 4077.

The other week, during DAR’s celebration of CARP’s 21st anniversary, Dir. Julita Ragandang and Provincial Agrarian Reform Officer (PARO) Glenn Sabijon hailed the approval of CARP extension for another five years.

The sizeable volume of VLT composed of 43,063.9479 hectares with 31,356 farmer-beneficiaries.

A paper containing DAR-Zambosur’s LAD cumulative accomplishment by land type distributed during Sabijon’s meeting with press members, Monday, last week, stated a total 61,215.5535 hecatres of land distributed under CARP, benifitting some 43,217 farmers.

Following VLT is operational land transfer (OLT), composed of 6,147.9724 hectares and 4,813 farmer-beneficiaries.

Sabijon, in his Land Tenure Improvement (LTI) accomplishment report covering January to May 2009, said that some 21.4572 hectares classified as OLT have already been submitted to DAR regional office and classified as distributed but not yet paid (DNYP).

Next are the government finance institutions (GFIs) with 5,900.0997 hectares and benefitting 3,384 farmers. As to GFIs, some 175.69 hectares were listed for submission and classified as DNYP, from the 1,463 targeted lands.

This was followed by those under PP2282 with 4,847 hectares and 2,818 beneficiaries.

As to DAR-Zambosur’s accomplishment in legal assistance covering January-May, this year, some 275 cases in agrarian law implementation has been targeted and with 224 present cases received, 190 of these has been resolved—an 83 percent attainment.

As to mediation, 500 were targeted, of which 218 were received and 209 were eventually resolved, translating to a 96 percent accomplishment.

All in all, 4,558 cases were listed for target in 2009, which includes representation before the courts and DARAB and legal counseling, among others, and a total 3,868 case resolved.

In whole, under CARP, some 7.2 M hectares of lands were previously distributed to 4.5 M farmer-beneficiaries, surpassing DAR’s land distribution targets.

Also, about 4.106 million hectares of the total accomplishment were distributed by DAR to 2.387 million beneficiaries. The rest consisted of uplands and ancestral domains distributed likewise by the DENR.

Agrarian Reform Sec. Nasser Pangandaman said his department’s land distribution target was increased from 100,000 hectares to 130,000 hectares and improved the disposition of several agrarian cases.