World Bank approves P24 B for SPLIT program

The World Bank has approved a P24-billion loan to be used in a program supporting parcelization of awarded lands falling under collective land ownership, Agrarian Reform Secretary John Castriciones announced yesterday.

Castriciones said the department’s “Support to Parcelization of Land to Individual Title (SPLIT)” is a program that seeks to give farmer-beneficiaries, covered under collective certificates of land ownership awards (CCLOA), the chance to identify and own their respective shares of farm lots.

The DAR chief said the approved loan package is P3 billion short of the P27 billion the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) had originally proposed.

He said the SPLIT program seeks to subdivide CCLOAs into individual land titles so that every farmer-beneficiary may exercise full ownership and possession and have complete say in cultivating the land the way he or she sees fit.

Castriciones said the issuance of CCLOAs has repercussions on the government as it could not collect taxes and amortization. The same can be said of many beneficiaries who are not engaged in collective farming. “All these issues can be cured once these CCLOAs are split into individual titles,” he added.

The secretary has set as his priority, in line with the implementation of the SPLIT, the procurement for every province of survey and other related equipment to identify and delineate exact boundaries of each farm lot, four-wheel drive vehicles and motorcycles for better mobility of DAR survey teams and the hiring of additional manpower.

Undersecretary Bernie Cruz of the DAR Foreign-Assisted and Special Projects Office said the issuance of CCLOAs had been the common practice before because of time constraints and intense pressure exerted by peasant and peasant-based non-government organizations.