The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
By Luis Leoncio
The appears to be no more stopping the plan of the Duterte administration to freeze for two years the conversion of agricultural lands to non-agricultural uses to further push the government’s food-security and food self-sufficiency program.
It’s a “done deal,” said Agrarian Reform Secretary Rafael Mariano in an interview with The Market Monitor, when asked about the executive order (EO) supposedly being prepared by the Office of the Executive Secretary implementing the freeze order. “The President has already approved it (EO) in principle.”
Mariano and Agriculture Secretary Manuel Piñol believe more land for agricultural purposes means more rice and other crops to satisfy the country’s food requirements.
In the interview, Mariano said the land-conversion moratorium was agreed upon last Sept. 13 during the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council (Parc) meeting that President Duterte led as chairman of the council. It marked the first time a President presided over a Parc meeting after 10 years.
Parc is the highest policy-making and coordinating body in the implementation of agrarian-reform programs. It was formed in 1988 with the passage of Republic Act 6657, or the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL).
The Market Monitor reported in its previous issue that four industry associations have submitted to the Office of the President a joint position paper appealing for a reconsideration of the proposal.
“The moratorium on land conversion will have an immediate and material adverse impact on the socioeconomic situation of the country, affecting especially the poor,” the industry groups’ statement said.
“It is antithetical to the present administration’s declared policy on the decongestion of urban areas, the decentralization and rationalization of development in rural areas, on inclusive growth, and on the creation of wealth and employment opportunities for the masses,” it added.
Those behind the proposed moratorium apparently did not consider its possible impact on others sectors of the economy, such as the real-estate industry, which is key to solving the perennial housing shortage.
The Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC) declared in a housing summit last July a shortage of 5.6 million housing units. By August this year, it said, the backlog swelled to 5.7 million and is projected to balloon to almost 12.5 million in 2030.
Experts have said that the moratorium was a simplistic approach to the food-security issue. They said modern farming techniques, such as mechanization or plantation-type cultivation, could increase production and maximize land use more than what expansion of land area for plantation could do. They cite Japan, a country that has much less agricultural land than the Philippines, which is self-sufficient when it comes to its food requirements because of its modern faming techniques.
Mariano said that during the Parc meeting, Mr. Duterte expressed his full support for the agrarian-reform program and wanted that all pieces of land up for distribution be awarded to qualified farmer beneficiaries under his term.
Mariano added that the EO would be applied to all awarded lands under Republic Act 6657, as amended, Presidential Decree No. 27 and other agrarian-reform laws.
Also, agricultural lands “with notices of coverage issued by DAR, irrigated and irrigable lands, prime agricultural lands, retention areas of the land owners that are tenanted, and agricultural lands with presence of agricultural activities that are being cultivated by the farmers individually or collectively are all covered in the EO implementation.”
Mariano said that once the EO is signed, a task force would be formed to review the status of land-use conversion and the DAR will issue the implementing rules for it.
DAR is currently reviewing land-conversion permits and land leasehold contracts.
Mariano said the moratorium is only the start of a comprehensive overhaul of the land-distribution process that will also require Congress to pass a new law to expand the coverage of the government’s agrarian-reform program and introduce a free or low-cost land distribution scheme.
“At present, DAR’s legal mandate still emanates from Republic Act 6657, or the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law of 1988. This law continues to give DAR the power to acquire, administer, distribute, and develop agricultural lands for agrarian reform purposes even after expiration of the period for Land Acquisition and Distribution in 2014. However, there remain several limitations in the current legal mandate,” Mariano said.
He said a new agrarian-reform law was needed to expand the mandate of the DAR and facilitate the coverage of more than 621,000 hectares of agricultural lands not yet covered by the agrarian-reform program.
Mariano said that the new law should consider coverage of lands previously exempted or excluded from agrarian-reform coverage at the least cost, if not free, to farmers.
The new law should also address problems encountered and currently faced by agrarian-reform beneficiaries, especially the payment of amortization under pain of foreclosure by the Land Bank of the Philippines, he added.
Mariano said that only about a quarter of the 906,997 beneficiaries of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) have completed payment of lands distributed to them.
“When we reviewed the books, it was made obvious that farmer-beneficiaries found it extremely difficult to pay their monthly amortization. This is a big policy issue that the legislature should address,” Mariano, himself a former legislator, said.
Data from DAR show that from 1972 to 2015, some 4.69 million hectares have already been distributed. Of these, 2.6 million hectares are private agrarian lands, while 2.1 million hectares are non-private lands.
“There is a need to fast-track the validation and inventory of all the lands that have been distributed to beneficiaries and review the conversion orders. It is important to do field validation and inventory to ensure that the distributed lands are still in the possession of farmers,” Mariano said.