These are among the questions raised by the Anakpawis partylist amid deliberations in the House Committee on Appropriations on the budgets of various executive departments of the government.
Anakpawis partylist Rep. Fernando Hicap also said he would raise the issue of “escalating trend of illegal land-use conversion that has effectively evicted thousands of farmers as in the case of poor farming communities in Hacienda Dolores in Pampanga and the Araneta Estate in Bulacan.”
In a statement, Anakpawis said that “while DAR might argue that the said LAD budget would only be used for the processing of lands that have already been issued with notices of coverage (NOCs) prior to the June 3, 2014 deadline, the very same flawed and generally pro-landlord principles and mechanisms of the government’s land reform program would still be in place making it utterly impossible still to genuinely distribute lands as proven by CARP’s three decades of complete failure in dispensing social justice to millions of landless farmers.”
“Three decades of CARP have not secured the tenure rights of the farmers over their lands. Hundreds of thousands of certificates of land ownership award (CLOAs) and emancipation patents (EPs) have already been cancelled due to DAR’s consistent record of favoring the petitions of landlords for exemption and land-use conversion,” the statement said.
Anakpawis noted that leasehold farmers have increased from 555,232 in 1988 to 1,216,430 in 2012. Lands under leasehold arrangements increased from 582,476 hectares in 1988 to 1,740,345 hectares in 2012.
“Millions of farmers are still under contract agreements with plantation owners and agribusiness corporations, many of which contracts are onerous to the interests of farmers and farmworkers. Some 1.2 million hectares are under agribusiness contracts,” it noted.
“Especially as CARP has already expired after three decades of dismal failure, what we need is a new program, a new law that would allow for the nationalization of all agricultural lands in the country and the free distribution of lands to the tillers,” said Hicap who is the principal author of House Bill 252 or the Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill.
Hicap noted how “token and inconsequential the efforts of the DAR have been in processing for acquisition and distribution lands that have already been issued with NOCs.”
He cited the cases of the 358 hectares of land controlled by the Cojuangco- Aquino-owned Tarlac Development Corporation (Tadeco).
“After having been served an NOC on December 2013 as regards the Tadeco land, the Cojuangco- Aquinos, in defiance of the notice, immediately secured the land by erecting concrete walls around it and stationing heavily armed private security personnel to ward off farmers who have long been tilling in the area,” Hicap said.
Hicap also vowed to take up during the budget deliberations the “escalating trend of illegal land-use conversion that has effectively evicted thousands of farmers as in the case of poor farming communities in Hacienda Dolores in Pampanga and the Araneta Estate in Bulacan, the cancellation of CLOAs and EPs of farmer-beneficiaries, and the March 2015 Commission on Audit report citing DAR’s anomalous use of at least P12 billion in the implementation of four foreign-assisted projects.”
