Tuesday, October 16, 2007 Leftist farmers want end to Carp By Danilo V. Adorador III
MILITANT farmers are urging the government not to extend the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (Carp), denouncing the country's land reform program as corrupt and calling for a new law, which they said, will truly benefit all land tenants.
The call of the leftwing Misamis Oriental Farmers Association (Mofa) came less than a week after a group of farmers from Sumilao town in Bukidnon staged a long walk from the agriculture-rich province to dramatize their appeal for the Carp's extension.
Around 200 Mofa members, mostly coming from the province's impoverished eastern towns, signified their call in an hour-long protest rally in front of the Capitol Monday.
Carp, whose funding is due to end in 2008, has not been effective as most of the lands acquired by the state and distributed to the farmers either remain unproductive because of necessary government support or that the lands themselves are not anymore suitable for farming, said Henry Trugillo, coordinator of the militant Bayan Muna in Northern Mindanao.
Trugillo, who also acted as Mofa's spokesman, said a new law should be passed replacing the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (Carl), the law that conceives the 19-year-old Carp, including it billions of appropriations.
"We need a genuine land reform initiative, not a sham program that tends to favor landlords; or one that is selective and discriminates the peasants of the countryside," Trugillo told Sun.Star Cagayan de Oro.
However, Mofa's stance contradicts the calls of other groups such as the Sumilao farmers, who seek Carp's extension so that the lands they claim they rightly own can still be covered under the program.
Crucial to the Carp issue is the government's decision whether to have the program's funding extended beyond 2008, or adopt a new land reform program with fresh budgetary allocations -- a proposal that may be agreeable to all farmers in both sides of the aisle.
Carp's land acquisition program still has a backlog of 1.3 million hectares as of December 2006, according to the Philippine Partnership for the Development of Human Resources in Rural Areas (PhilDHRRA), an umbrella of non-government organizations involved in development activities in rural communities.
PhilDHRRA proposes Carp's funding extension for the "provision of new funds" and the amendment of Carl "to address several operational issues of said program."
Under the "extension with reforms" bill, PhilDRRA says Carp funding would be provided through automatic appropriations by Congress. The proposed annual budget for Carp under the bill is set at 3.8 percent of the annual budget of government or around P38 billion per year."
According to PhilDRRA, the bill should also put a seven-year deadline for the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) to finish the land acquisition component of Carp.
