Congress agrees to extend CARP anew

MANILA, Philippines - Congressional leaders have agreed to extend the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) before the second regular session of Congress ends on June 11.

House of Representatives Majority Leader Neptali Gonzales ll said yesterday the agreement was arrived at during a meeting with President Aquino last week.

Aquino appealed to the House and the Senate to extend CARP before the June adjournment, he added.

The program expired on June 30, 2014 after three or four extensions.

Gonzales said it is not yet clear how long the program would be extended this time.

This would depend on the committee on agrarian reform and those supporting and opposing the bill that would prolong CARP, he added.

One of those who attended the meeting with Aquino in Malacañang was Rep. Alfredo Benitez of Negros Occidental, who heads the Visayas bloc of more than 30 House members. The group is opposing CARP extension.

Benitez said they have no more reason to prolong the program.

“All the big agricultural lands that have to be covered have already been covered and distributed to farmer-tillers,” he said.

‘What’s left are small landholdings, those 10 hectares and below, which the law allowed the owners to hold on to and continue to till.”

Benitez said the money to be appropriated for prolonging CARP should better be used to support agrarian reform beneficiaries to be more productive.

 “We might as well allocate the money for support services to farmers,” he said.

Benitez said farmer-beneficiaries in his province who have no savings and access to cheap credit were forced to turn to usurers for production loans, driving them deep in debt and eventually forcing them to sell their farm lots even if this was illegal.

“Agricultural productivity has suffered since the government divided big farming areas into small lots and distributed these to farmers who did not have the money to shoulder the cost of production,” he said.

It would be interesting to find out how many of the original beneficiaries of the agrarian reform program since the Marcos administration still own the land they acquired from their landlords and how many have sold their lots, Benitez said.

Before the CARP law expired last year, agrarian reform advocates in the House tried again to extend the program but they ran out of time.

Even if the law had expired, the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) was mandated to continue distributing lands whose owners have been issued notice of coverage (NOC), Ifugao Rep. Teddy Baguilat, House agrarian reform committee chairman, said.