By Perla Lena/Philippine News Agency
ILOILO CITY — The Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) in Iloilo on Tuesday launched it’s Land Acquisition and Distribution (LAD)-Free Iloilo 2022 in response to the statement of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte that he wants the program to be fully implemented at the end of his term.
Iloilo Provincial Agrarian Reform Program Officer (PARPO) Lucrecia S. Taberna, in her message during the short program, said she hoped to deliver not less than 100 percent of their Land Tenure Security Program (LTSP) by end of June.
With the launching, they can now start with the identification and validation of landholdings.
These include 1,398 hectares for the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP); some 29,000 hectares to be parcelized for the Collective Land Ownership Awards (CLOAs) and some 2,500 hectares under Executive Order 75, series of 2019 that directs all departments, institutions, government instrumentalities to identify all government-owned land suitable for agriculture to be distributed to agrarian reform beneficiaries.
“We will program this until 2022. On the part of PARPO Iloilo we already submitted the funding requirement, identification of human resources to do the job, equipment, and vehicles to do all different activities in order to complete the land distribution and acquisition by 2022 to the top management,” she said.
She likewise appealed for cooperation from stakeholders as she noted that the big challenge is the status of CLOA holders at the ground.
The launching of the LAD-Free Iloilo was held simultaneous with the celebration of the 31st anniversary of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.
DAR Assistant Regional Director Ronald M. Gareza, in his message, said one challenge in line with the celebration is for them to “improve the quality of lives of agrarian reform beneficiaries”.
“It’s not just of giving the land to the farmers, but of course to improve the quality of lives of our agrarian reform beneficiaries. This is one thing that we have to consider in celebrating the 31st CARP anniversary because the President has himself been telling us that we should implement the aggressive agrarian reform program in our areas of responsibilities,” he said.
He also cited the significance of support services, as he announced that Iloilo was allotted PHP3 million for projects to be funded under the Climate Resilient Farm Productivity Support Project.
Following the launching was a forum with agrarian reform beneficiaries organizations and civil society organizations that tackled the guidelines and procedures on how to parcelize landholdings with collective CLOAs, land amortization, ARB insurance and roles of the DAR, Assessor and Treasurer’s office for DAR beneficiaries.
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