LUCENA CITY—Slow distribution of land “was not caused by overlapping land titles but by the inept leadership” of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), said nongovernment organization Kilusan Para sa Tunay na Repormang Agraryo at Katarungan Panlipunan (Katarungan).
Jansept Geronimo, spokesperson of Katarungan-Quezon, said that of the estimated 16,000 hectares of lands for distribution in the Bondoc Peninsula, “only 5 percent” had overlapping land titles.
Geronimo, in a phone interview on Monday, said that despite the token parcels of land with title problems, the DAR still failed to distribute to the farmers the vast lands covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).
He reiterated his group’s call to President Benigno Aquino to fire Agrarian Reform Secretary Virgilio de los Reyes.
Last week in Baguio City, De los Reyes blamed the slow distribution of land to the “mess in land administration management,” where competing agencies like the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) occasionally raced with the DAR in issuing land titles.
De los Reyes said that in many cases, multiple titles tended to overlap, resulting in land disputes. He said the messy situation left gaps in land registration records when some of the titles were lost or destroyed, causing delay in the processing of land for distribution.
Geronimo said the overlapping of titles issue was just being used by De los Reyes as cover-up for the DAR’s failure to implement agrarian reform in Bondoc Peninsula.
Geronimo accused De los Reyes of preventing fast implementation of agrarian reform when he issued Administrative Order No. 7 in 2011, which limited the scope of land to be distributed under CARP with Extension and Reforms (Carper).
AO 7 also disallowed the transfer to the government of land titles that have pending cases from resistant landowners, including petitions for exclusions and exemption of the landholdings from CARP. The same order does not allow processing of coverage of lands that do not have a complete master list of agrarian reform beneficiaries.
“AO 7 is the one hampering the faster implementation of land reform program,” Geronimo said.
He noted that in the long years of the Bondoc Peninsula farmers’ struggle, only 480 ha from the more than 1,200-ha estate owned by the heirs of Domingo Reyes in the towns of San Narciso, Buenavista and San Andres had been distributed in February last year in Mulanay town.
Geronimo said no more land distribution followed after that and worse, big landowners in the area were fencing their properties to stop beneficiaries from taking possession of the land awarded to them.
The DAR-Quezon denied it stopped land distribution in Bondoc Peninsula after the Mulanay event and insisted it had distributed 3,400 hectares.
Geronimo dared the local DAR to show the list of new certificate of land ownership awards (Cloa) recipients in Bondoc Peninsula so they could validate the record.
“The local DAR has yet to show us the list of new Cloa holders,” he said.
Geronimo cited the case of Hacienda Matias in San Francisco town, which covers around 1,700 ha, but DAR had yet to determine the total number for distribution because of an exemption case filed by the estate in the Office of the President.
Records of Kilusang Magbubukid ng Bondoc Peninsula showed six farmer-leaders were killed while some 400 criminal cases, mostly for theft of coconuts, were filed against more than 300 tenants seeking to own the land they till.
The extended CARP is set to end this month but the President has asked Congress to pass an urgent bill to extend anew the land reform program until 2016.