Hacienda farmers can have ‘best of both worlds’–DAR

Farmworker-beneficiaries in Hacienda Luisita need not wrack their brains over whether they should go for individual titles or a collective one for the sugar estate awarded to them.

They can have the best of both worlds: Individual titles but collective farming, according to Agrarian Reform Secretary Virgilio de los Reyes.

“You can have individual titles, but you can farm collectively,” De los Reyes, who is preparing a video presentation to address questions of the 6,296 farmer-beneficiaries, said in a phone interview on Saturday.

De los Reyes said the video presentation was designed to help farmer-beneficiaries make an “informed choice” over what option to take.

He said the debate among farmers had been erroneously framed as a choice between individual certificates of land ownership award (Cloa) or a collective Cloa, when there is in fact the option of individual title-collective farming, which is favored by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) and the CARP Extension with Reforms (CARPer).

“People mix up collective cultivation with collective title … That’s the first conceptual problem of the debate,” he said.

Whether a collective Cloa or individual Cloa should be granted to the farmworker-beneficiaries was a nonissue because the new agrarian reform law mandates the issuance of individual titles, a farmer group lawyer’s said, however.

Republic Act No. 9700, or the CARPer, mandates the issuance of individual certificates of land ownership award (Cloa) to farmers, said Christian Monsod, counsel for the 1,200-strong farmers’ group, Farmworkers Agrarian Reform Movement (FARM).

“Farmers should get an individual Cloa under CARPer, which frowns on collective Cloas and mandates that farms under collective Cloas should make them individual Cloas. Pity the farmers; they can’t mortgage the property in a collective Cloa,” he said by phone.

Even FARM chair Renato Lalic had earlier said they wanted individual Cloas.

CARPer provides that in general, the land awarded to a farmer-beneficiary should be in the form of an individual title, but says that collective titles may be issued if the current management of the land is not appropriate for individual farming, the labor system is specialized, the beneficiaries are farming large contiguous areas, and the farm consists of multiple crops being farmed in an integrated manner.