THE World Bank has approved a $370-million loan for the Department of Agrarian Reform’s project that will provide individual land titles to some 750,000 agrarian reform beneficiaries.
The projected, called Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT), will facilitate land titles for more than 1.3 million hectares of land earlier granted under the country’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), the Washington-based development lender said in a statement Saturday.
The project is designed to accelerate the subdivision of collective Certificates of Land Ownership Award (CLOAs) and generate individual titles on lands awarded under the CARP, it added.
“Many farmers who were granted lands under the country’s agrarian reform program have been waiting for individual titles, sometimes for decades,” said Achim Fock, World Bank Acting Country Director for Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.
“This project will provide them the opportunity, on a voluntary basis, to get legal proof and the security of individual land rights. We expect that this will encourage them to invest in their property and adopt better technologies for greater productivity and higher incomes.”
Improving land tenure security will reduce poverty, spur rural economica growth and strengthen the farmers’ resilience against impacts of COVID-19, Fock said.
“Many of them lack social security, savings and access to formal financing. With individual land titles, beneficiaries will have greater access to credit and financing, as well as government assistance,” he added.
The World Bank said the Philippines has had an extensive history of inequitable land tenure.
Large private estates dominated the rural landscape since the Spanish colonial period. Farmers, who cultivated the land under share-cropping arrangement, had no option to own the land they tilled.
As many farmers were left with no land titles, Congress in 1998 passed the agrarian reform law to provide land tenure security.
Since then, the CARP has distributed some 4.8 million hectares to almost three million beneficiaries, of which only 53 percent of lands distributed was in the form of individual titles.
In the 1990s, the government had issued mostly collective land ownership awards to speed up land distribution, with the intention of subdividing and titling them individually at a future time.(ABS-CBN News)
