MANILA, Philippines -- Speaker Prospero Nograles said he was willing to support the proposed extension of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) “provided there will be no more conversions of agricultural lands.”

There are at least two bills that have been filed at the House of Representatives seeking to extend for another five years the CARP law, which will expire this June.

But instead of giving rise to more subdivisions and golf courses, Nograles said this extension should be used as an opportunity to ensure food security in the country.

"The defect of the CARP is that it shrunk our farmlands because even arable lands were converted into residential areas, golf courses and industrial areas," he said in a statement on Friday.

"We can extend CARP only if conversions will no longer be allowed and allow the promotion of corporate farming," he said.

Nograles said there have been many failures in the implementation of the CARP because there was no mechanism that should have ensured the productivity for farmer beneficiaries.

"From what I've gathered, many farmer beneficiaries of agrarian reform used their seed capital to buy new TVs and refrigerators instead of using the money to modernize their farms," he said.

"On the other hand, owners of vast tracks of lands found a way out to exempt themselves from CARP by converting their lands into industrial and residential lands," he said.

This practice should be stopped or the government would again fail in achieving the real purpose of the CARP, he said.

The Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) has placed seven million hectares under CARP benefiting about four million farmers, Nograles said.

But two million hectares of land are yet to be placed under the agrarian reform program and that will take another 10 years before these lands could be fully distributed to farmer beneficiaries, he pointed out.

Nograles said President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had also endorsed his proposal for the adoption of "corporate farming" as a government policy to promote food security.

Nograles said the President herself has conveyed this to him and ordered Agricultural Secretary Arthur Yap to conduct a study on how this scheme could be put into action.

While details of the proposal have yet to be fleshed out and was still in its conceptual stage, Nograles said corporations and other business entities with at least 2,000 employees should be required to engage in corporate farming with rice as their primary crop.

Vast tracks of unused public lands, particularly those in Mindanao, can be tapped for such corporate farms, Nograles said.

"Corporations can also enter into joint venture agreements with farmer beneficiaries of agrarian reform," he added.