SEVENTY-SIX farmers in Toboso town received about 45 hectares of land covered through Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms (Carper) of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR).

Municipal Agrarian Reform Program Officer Jasmin Castillo, who spoke at the distribution and installation rites recently, urged farmer-beneficiaries to make the land productive to attain economic stability.

She also told agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) to remember their obligations as new landowners like paying annual amortization and land taxes.

The 45.8168-hectare covered landholding was formerly owned by Albino dela Cruz and situated in Barangay Salamanca in the northern Negros Occidental locality.

Under the DAR's mandate, public and private agricultural landholdings are acquired by the government to be distributed to tenants, farmers, farmworkers and other tillers who are qualified to become ARBs.

This is in the form of certificates of land ownership award (Cloas) covering one contiguous tract or several parcels of land accumulated up to a maximum of three hectares per ARB.

DAR-Negros Occidental I, in a statement, said the agency aims to provide lands to landless farmers and farmworkers.

It also guarantees the farmers' land security, delivers social equity and provides them with the necessary products and emergency resources thereby ensuring their economic viability and productivity.

It is the lead government agency that holds and implements comprehensive and genuine agrarian reform which actualizes equitable land distribution, ownership, agricultural productivity, and tenurial security for the tillers of the land towards the improvement of the quality of their lives, it added.

For his part, Mayor Richard Jaojoco, in a message delivered by a representative, also called on the farmers to be responsible land owners and make sure that the land given to them will not go to waste.

With Negros Occidental still under the modified general community quarantine, the agency said the activity has complied with the minimum health protocols set by the authorities.