New DAR chief vows to settle all land cases

Newly appointed Agrarian Reform Secretary Rene Villa has vowed to finish all pending contentious land reform cases and weed out graft in the agency.

In an interview with ANC yesterday, Villa said that there are still 13,000 cases waiting to be resolved by the Department of Agrarian Reform Adjudication Board (DARAB).

Villa said that incomplete records and lack of lawyers are the reasons why a majority of cases have not been resolved.

"We cannot attract good lawyers because the pay is low. But I told our lawyers yesterday to decide all these cases. A bad decision is better than no decision," he said, explaining that while a bad decision can be appealed, there is no remedy if DAR cannot decide.

Villa added that he will propose a new incentive scheme for DARAB lawyers to motivate them to finish all cases despite their limited budget allocation.

"We should review the incentive scheme because the budget of the DARAB depends on the number of cases they handle. So if there are only a few cases, the budget is not that large," he said, adding that the new incentive mechanism will address this discrepancy.

Villa formally took over from Jose Mari Ponce in turn-over ceremonies held at the DAR main office in Quezon City.

Villa said that in line with his thrust on agrarian justice, he intends to infuse more resources for support services than on land acquisition.

The existing DAR mindset is that agrarian reform is basically land distribution, he said, but "land distribution is meaningless without an improvement in the lives of beneficiaries and improvement in the communities."

Citing the 1987 Constitution, Villa said the state shall promote a comprehensive agrarian reform and rural development.

"And agrarian reform in the Constitution is tied up to full employment and economic growth," he said.

At present, 70 percent of the DAR’s budget goes to land acquisition from private land owners, and 30 percent to support services such as the construction of farm-to-market roads and farm inputs such as seeds and fertilizers.

Villa however said that the ratio and figures need to be adjusted as the DAR only has 835,000 hectares of land left to buy from private landowners and subject to land reform and distribution to landless farmers.

"We will have to adjust the figures and put more money into support services," he said, explaining that since the land to be acquired is getting smaller, the budget for this should be reduced.

Villa said that DAR has managed to distribute 3.5 million hectares of land in the past 16 years. According to him, the remaining 835,000 hectares to be distributed are the most contentious as these are private lands.

He said the lands have remained undistributed because the landowners put up resistance to the program.

"These are actually private agricultural lands. The ones that were previously distributed were government owned lands," he said.

Villa also promises to make the DAR client-friendly to landless farmers, and this is where his expertise as a lawyer comes in.

"Since I’m a lawyer my purpose is agrarian justice. It is justice for the poor and justice for the landowner. In the DAR, you have to do a lot of balancing interests for the farmers and the landowners," the DAR chief said.