MikeLigalig.com

By Rey Anthony Chiu

NEW hope sprouts among landless farmers, whose hopes of owning a piece of land, dims over the impending end of the country’s comprehensive reform program (CARP).

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on Friday certified as urgent a bill seeking a 10-year extension of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL) to 2018.

The CARL, or Republic Act (RA) 6657 which took effect in 1988, mandates the government to set aside funds for the implementation of the project until 2008. By the same law, the program, while still continuing as program would be out of funds by the time the program expires next year.

But with the President’s move, the ball is now at the hands of the new congress who shall decide to pass an appropriation budget to keep the government flagship social justice program steaming with new vitality, hints Provincial Agrarian Reform Officer Johnson Sinco.

Over this, Sinco, who is also a lawyer, expressed elation over the development, considering that the local Department of Agrarian Reform office here has to go more to implement its mandate of leading the implementation of land tenure improvement and beneficiary improvement.

“Not until the vision of a nation where there is equitable land ownership and empowered agrarian reform beneficiaries effectively managing their own economic and social development will DAR attain its full success,” Sinco stated in a DAR report recently.

In Bohol, DAR still has a working balance of 4,842 hectares for distribution, with 6,671 potential agrarian reform beneficiaries.

According to DAR, while they have prepared for the term end for CARP, looking at a shift from land tenure improvement to project beneficiaries development in the more than 23 thousand farmer beneficiaries.

Now, on the part of the employees, their would now be certainty and therefore boosting of morale their morale. The mental anguish of losing their job would now be at least reduced with that pronouncement, Sinco said.

Meanwhile, Agrarian Reform Secretary Nasser Pangandaman said the 10-year extension would allow the government to fully cover the remaining two million hectares still to be placed under the CARP that will benefit an additional two million farmers.

Seven million hectares have already been placed under CARP since 1988, benefiting about four million farmers.

Thus far, the CARP support services have created 500,000 jobs in infrastructure, Pangandaman said.

CARP envisions "to make the countryside economically viable for the Filipino family by building opportunities toward lasting peace and sustainable rural development."

The President has time and again said that land ownership can end poverty in developing countries like the Philippines.-- PIA

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