Manila Standard Today
Lance Baconguis
Oct. 28, 2014
Hundreds of hectares of farm land planted to sugar cane in Negros Occidental, which were placed under the coverage of the agrarian reform program, have been issued titles and sold to new owners, a peasant group said on Monday.
Alberto Jayme, president of Task Force Mapalad (TFM), said the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) has been slow in distributing about 700,000 hectares of agricultural land in the area and the owners have obtained new titles to the property, which they sold to the new owners.
“The law is very clear on the prohibition and selling or transferring ownership of farms already covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (Carp). We wonder why the Register of Deeds, an agency under the Land Registration Authority, is tolerating this illegal act by issuing new titles,” Jayme said.
The Carp, which became a law in 1988,requires that all lands exceeding seven hectares were to be bought by the government and sold to landless farmers. But the implementation has been opposed by powerful landlords, including the family of President Aquino, who owned the 6,000-hectare Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac.
Negros Occidental is one of the provinces with the biggest combined area of agricultural land that have not yet been distributed to farmers. As of December 2013, more than 129,000 hectares remained to be distributed to the farmers.
Jayme said the new titles issued by the Register of Deeds has derailed the implementation of Carp in the province and “deprived the farmers of their right to own land.
“Because of DAR’s slowness in acquiring and distributing landholdings to farmer-beneficiaries, hacienderos in Negros Occidental have been given so much time to employ Carp evasion tactics such as the getting new titles from the Register of Deeds,” he said.
In some cases, the banks where the land has been mortgaged also violate the law by the selling unredeemed farms to new owners instead of having them covered by the Carp, Jayme said.
Jayme cited three haciendas that have been illegally sold, transferred, or subdivided and the Register of Deeds have issued them new titles, which deprived nearly 100 farmer-beneficiaries.
“Using the new titles as basis, a surveyor from DAR was told by the lawyer of the landowner to stop placing the hacienda under the Carp,” Jayme said.