By Veronica Uy

Conflicts involving land use such as the construction of a resort in the tourism destination Chocolate Hills in Bohol, the drawn-out territorial dispute between Makati and Taguig, and the controversial conversions of agricultural farms to residential subdivisions, are avoidable.

This is according to the Departments of Agrarian Reform, Environment and Natural Resources, Human Settlements and Urban Development, Interior and Local Government, the National Commission on Indigenous People, and local government units plus various non-profit organizations that expressed support for the passage of the National Land Use Act.

The proposed measure of Siargao Rep. Francisco Jose “Bingo” Matugas II is the nth iteration of the bill. And participants to the Land Use Summit 2024 forum, which has the theme “National Land Use for Sustainable Development, Food Security, and Climate Change,” said the bill is the best so far as it will resolve the ongoing conflicts among government agencies.

Over the 30 years since it was first introduced in Congress, government agencies have separately instituted their own dispute mechanisms in the absence of an overall national policy or agency on land use.

“With the passage of the law, there will be a commission, a super body comprising of all these agencies, under the office of the President, headed by a commissioner and deputy commissioners. They’ll be responsible for ensuring that all the functions of four levels—municipal, provincial, regional, national—with regard to the national framework, to the physical plans, and all policies pertinent thereto, are coming from this commission,” said Agrarian Reform Undersecretary Luis Pangulayan.

Undersecretary Pangulayan, who is a lawyer, said that once enacted into law, the bill will address issues of land-use classification, policies, and actual land use. He said it has not become law since it was first introduced in 1994 because of conflicting interests.

“The delay is due to varying interests and mandates…The commission which will be created by the law will help in the convergence of policies… Hopefully it will pass. I think Senator Cynthia Villar will be amenable to the bill because then she only has to talk to one agency, not the many that are now involved in the conversion of agricultural lands to residential subdivisions,” he said, noting that the senator, whose family business has become one of the largest real-estate companies in the country, has always complied with conversion requirements.

Undersecretary Pangulayan gave the assurance that the commission will have a strong say in national land-use.

“Other agencies can ignore an inter-agency body. But a commissioner with the President’s blessings can actually instruct all concerned agencies into executing the commission’s policies,” he said. “It will have a clear mandate under the Office of the President. He will be the Toscanini, the conductor, of national land use. While he will only have two deputies with a small budget, the commission will be a super body.”

He said the new body will not be a redundancy to the bureaucracy.

“We will all sit in the commission. We’ll all follow the conductor. The centralized body will act as the super body that will be involved in the formulation of policies, monitoring, and enforcement. All the policies that this commission will formulate will trickle down to the separate agencies and will use these policies for their respective mandates,” he said.

Undersecretary Pangulayan said he is confident the law will pass as President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has indicated that this is a priority bill.

“I hope the bill will pass. President Bongbong is different. He wants his legacy. I thought he would not sign the bill condoning farmers who have not paid for the farms distributed to them, but he did. He will not create a bureaucracy to slow down the delivery of government service, but a sort of central apparatus. And we will follow him as president. We will sing the same song, the same tune,” he said.

A US$370-million loan agreement has been signed between the Philippines and the World Bank for a project that aims to speed up the process of splitting about 1.4 million hectares of land covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP). With this loan, CARP beneficiaries around 750,000 farmers. will be then provided with their individual titles to these parcelized lots.

Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III and Mr. Achim Fock, who was then the World Bank’s Acting Country Director for Brunei, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand, signed the loan agreement last July 14 for the Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT) Project of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR).

“The SPLIT project will improve the bankability of farmers and enable them to access credit and government assistance,” Secretary Dominguez said.  “It will support our economic recovery program by intensifying assistance to farmers and making agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) more resilient to the economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic,” Secretary Dominguez said.

“We truly appreciate the World Bank’s funding support for this initiative designed to make CARP beneficiaries far more productive members of the farm sector, in step with President Duterte’s goal of boosting agricultural productivity and food security, especially at this time of the pandemic, and achieving financial inclusion for all Filipinos,” he added.

Mr. Fock said the World Bank expects the project to encourage ARBs “to invest in their property and adopt better technologies for greater productivity and higher incomes.”

Under the project, the collective certificate of land ownership awards (CCLOAs) will be parcelized into individual titles for some 750,000 ARBs to help fulfill the completion of the decades-old CARP.

The government has redistributed about 4.8 million hectares of land to some 2.8 million ARBs under the agrarian reform program, but only 53 percent were in the form of individual land titles.

The remaining 47 percent or about 2.5 million hectares are CCLOA titles that were issued to groups of ARBs in the 1990s as a temporary measure to fast-track the distribution of land to farmer-beneficiaries.

The parcelization of the CCLOAs into individual titles has been very slow, which is why about 1.4 million hectares remain to be subdivided among farmers under the SPLIT project.

“Through the project, ARBs will be provided security of tenure by way of issuance of individual titles. If ARBs or members of their family fall ill, clear and valid documentation of their property will allow them to mortgage their land, sell, or pass it on to their family members through inheritance,” the Department of Finance (DOF) said.

The total cost of the SPLIT Project is US$473.56 million, of which US$370 million will be funded by the World Bank, while the government will provide the counterpart financing for the balance of US$103.56 Million.

The loan agreement for the project carries a 29-year maturity period, inclusive of a grace period of 10-and-a-half years.