MANILA, Philippines — A total of 1,006 agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) in Eastern Visayas received 1,047 land titles, said the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) on Saturday.
According to DAR, the land titles cover 1,571 hectares of agricultural lands across the six provinces of Eastern Visayas, namely Biliran, Eastern Samar, Leyte, Northern Samar, Samar, and Southern Leyte.
Secretary Conrado Estrella III, along with Senator Imee Marcos, led the distribution last Thursday.
“We need to improve our mechanization program and provide our farmers with farm inputs such as fertilizers and hybrid seeds,” Marcos said.
Estrella also assured the ARBs that the DAR is ready to assist them and their needs, urging the farmers not to sell the lands that were given to them.
“Make your awarded lands productive and sustainable for you to become self-reliant food producers of the nation,” said the DAR chief.
The land titles that were distributed through the Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT) project.
According to the DAR’s website, the SPLIT project involves the distribution of 1.38 million hectares of collective land titles.
DAR Eastern Visayas Regional Director Robert Anthony Yu urged ARBs to join farmer organizations so that the agency could easily reach out and support them.
Yu said in the statement that “individual titles will not only benefit the ARBs, but also the local government units where the properties are located, in terms of possible earnings from tax payments that can be collected due to the ownership of land.”
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