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By Nora O. Gamolo, Senior Desk Editor
The bishops of the Catholic Church are leading
the campaign for the extension of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform
Program (CARP).
But they are also clamoring for reforms in its
implementation, even if it requires amendments to the present
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law.
They want extension “with reforms” to
achieve “an effective completion of land acquisition and
distribution accompanied by a real start in delivering adequate and
sustained support services to beneficiaries.”
CARP took effect on June 10, 1988 with a life of
10 years, the latest in a continuing series of government-funded and
initiated land reform programs. It allows government to acquire and
then distribute lands to landless farmers. In 1998, funding for CARP
was tended for another 10 years. This new life through funding will
expire on June 10.
Bishops-Legislators Caucus
The plea to extend CARP’s life once more has
been made to lawmakers and the Philippine government by more than
200 delegates in the Bishops-Legislators Caucus 3, held last
week—on May 5 and 6—in Quezon City and Manila.
The bishops together with other agrarian reform
advocates passed a resolution addressed to Congress calling for
reforms.
They asked for a bigger budget to ensure
CARP’s tasks are completed in five to seven years’ time,
specifying that priority should be given to the acquisition and
distribution of big landholdings. They also asked for the removal of
non-distributive schemes from CARP in favor of direct and physical
distribution of lands.
They also recommended a bigger budget for
support services to help agrarian reform beneficiaries develop, gain
greater access to credit. They also asked for support services to
recognize and enforce the right of rural women to own and control
land.
They also called for the state to give greater
protection of beneficiaries from both state and non-state human
rights violators, specifying that this protection start from the
time the beneficiaries begin claiming their entitlements under CARP
to that point where these entitlements are fully secured.
The bishops also asked that exclusive
jurisdiction over all agrarian reform cases be given to the
Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), especially where it concerns
land acquisition and distribution cases.
Noting many cases have reached a dead end, the
bishops also called for the expansion and strengthening of the
functions of the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council, and the
creation of a congressional oversight committee to monitor the
entire implementation of the extended CARP.
Finally, the bishops called for stronger
sanctions and penalties for officials responsible for the
non-implementation of the law and landowners and farmers who do not
comply with the law.
DAR officials’ reaction
The Department of Agrarian Reform’s Secretary
Nasser Pangandaman and Undersecretary Gerundio Madueno welcomed the
proposal to extend CARP. The DAR had representatives in the
Technical Working Group of the multisectoral Caucus.
“We [at DAR] still have one million hectares
to acquire and distribute and we want to finish our job,” said
Madueno, referring to its backlog of lands targeted for CARP
coverage.
Said Belinda Formanes, member of the ad extra
secretariat of the Second National Rural Congress and executive
director of the nongovernment organization (NGO) Partnership for
Agrarian Reform and Rural Development Services Inc. (PARDDS), “We
deeply appreciate the bishops’ efforts to mediate between the
farmers’ group and the government, particularly the legislators.
Of course, the organized farmers and the support NGOs play a major
role. But without the bishops’ help, the government would not have
really listened.”
The bishops and agrarian reform advocates remain
optimistic that it is still possible to have a CARP extension before
the program ends its 20 years of implementation on June 10 or only a
little over three weeks from today.
Advocates like Formanes said that the bishops
themselves were instrumental in the approval on May 7 of the
consolidated substitute bill.
Many bishops sat through the sessions and
directly lobbied with their dioceses’ congressmen to have the bill
approved in the committee level.
The House Committee on Agrarian Reform, chaired
by Rep. Elias Bulut Jr. of Apayao, had already approved the
five-year extension of CARP to 2013.
Catholic Church leaders present in the Caucus
were CBCP President Archbishop Angel Lagdameo, CBCP Vice President
Bishop Nereo Odchimar, and Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, chairman of
the Central Committee of the Second Rural Congress.
The House contingent was represented by Rep.
Edcel Lagman; Rep. Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel, chairman of the House
Agrarian Reform Committee; and Rep. Abraham Mitra. Earlier, Senate
President Manuel Villar and House Speaker Prospero Nograles joined
the advocates.
The Caucus is the third with legislators and
civil society groups.
Also present in this gathering were
representatives of the Alternative Law Group, Federation of Free
Farmers, Consortium for the Advancement of People’s Participation
through Sustainable Area Development Inc., Education for Life, and
Urban Poor Associates.
Extension of CARP, the bishops and the pro-CARP
NGOs said, will address “what still remains as one of the most
crucial and urgent issues of justice, peace and development in our
country by ensuring land acquisition and distribution of all
agricultural lands under Republic Act 6657, or the Comprehensive
Agrarian Reform Law until 2013, or five years after R.A. 6657 would
have lapsed on June 10, 2008.”
Thirty-five bishops, members of the House
Committees on Agrarian Reform and Appropriations, key officers of
the Department of Agrarian Reform, civil society, development
community, and other stakeholders collectively urged lawmakers to
approve for President Arroyo to sign into law the bill now pending
at the House of Representatives consolidating 12 original House
bills and four Senate bills all seeking the extension of the
controversy-laden Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).
CARP covers all public and private agricultural
lands, whatever land tenure arrangements govern them and whatever
their produce.
The original law specified the time limit of 10
years for the government to complete the acquisition and
distribution of these lands.
When the work was not completed, a law was
passed to extended the funding of the CARP.
Unjust economic order
The bishops of the Catholic Church started
calling for the extension of CARP as early as January 2007 when the
Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines released a
pastoral statement entitled The Dignity of the Rural Poor—A Gospel
Concern.
That pastoral statement said “the law [is]
defective in the first place, emasculated in the very beginning in a
landlord-dominated Congress, further watered down in
implementation.” It also noted that the poor had been
“horrendously displaced in the recent extrajudicial killings” of
farmers.
In their call for the extension and review of
the CARP, the Catholic bishops said the rural poor were “the
greatest victim of our unjust economic order,” and their
diminishment “a negation of Christian love.”
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