Bishops push land reform

By: Jocelyn R. Uy - 10 years ago

Quezon farmers march from Lucena City to Manila on Tuesday, June 3, 2014, to demand the completion of the government’s land reform program and the return of the coconut levy fund. Eighty-one members of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines have called on President Aquino to “give new life and a glorious finish” to the 27-year-old agrarian reform program to help at least 1 million Filipino farmers find a path out of poverty. DELFIN T. MALLARI JR./INQUIRER SOUTHERN LUZON

MANILA, Philippines–A big number of bishops have called on President Aquino to “give new life and a glorious finish” to the 27-year-old agrarian reform program to help at least 1 million Filipino farmers find a path out of poverty.

Eighty-one members of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) made the appeal to the President and members of the Senate and the House of Representatives in a two-page letter posted on the CBCP official news website, CBCP News, on Saturday night.

CBCP News described the statement as the bishops’ “biggest public appeal” so far involving agrarian reform.

“[W]e appeal to the President to certify urgent and to the members of the two chambers of Congress to immediately pass the two proposed laws,” said the prelates, referring to House Bill No. 4296 and House Bill No. 4375.

HB 4296 would renew the authority of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) to issue notices of coverage and provide adequate funding for support services to agricultural landholdings that have not yet been placed under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) launched in 1988 by then President Corazon Aquino.

Independent commission

HB 4375 would establish an independent Agrarian Reform Commission that would review the CARP’s accomplishments and investigate violations of the agrarian reform law.

Both measures remain pending in the House despite certification as urgent by Aquino in June 2014.

While the Senate has passed the counterpart of HB 4296, the House has yet to pass it on third and final reading.

The bishops also appealed to the lawmakers not to allow the CARP to “die a quiet death” without accomplishing its mission to “emancipate and liberate” the Filipino farmers.

“Not extending the CARP and ensuring the gains of the program is tantamount to disenfranchising at least a million farmers of their right to own the land they till, equitably share in the fruits of their labor and find a path out of poverty,” the bishops said.

“It also means the country’s failure to break up the unjust concentration of land ownership in a few and thereby not achieve inclusive growth,” they said.

Citing August 2014 data of the DAR, the bishops said about 708,000 hectares of agricultural land had yet to be awarded to farmers.

Evasions

They also said roughly 1.0 million to 1.5 million hectares of land that the DAR claimed had already been distributed were not yet under the control of CARP beneficiaries, making them “suspect as evasions of the law, such as lands under collective certificate of landownership award (Cloa) and land distributed as voluntary land transfers and voluntary offer to sell.”

“Unless these transactions are voided and the land distributed to legitimate farmer-beneficiaries, the landowners and the DAR personnel complicit in the evasions will be rewarded for defying the law,” the bishops said.

Such evasions were also unfair to landowners who allowed their lands to be genuinely distributed to poor farmers, with some of them still to be compensated, the bishops said.

Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas, president of the CBCP, 15 archbishops, 59 bishops and seven Church administrators signed the letter.

Among the signatories were Cebu Archbishop Jose Palma, Cagayan de Oro Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, Jaro Archbishop Angel Lagdameo, Lipa Archbishop Ramon Arguelles and Zamboanga Archbishop Romulo de la Cruz.