Estrella: DAR moving ‘full speed’ to split collective land titles

MANILA, Philippines – Agrarian Reform Secretary Conrado Estrella III said on Thursday his agency is “moving full speed ahead” in breaking up collective land titles as the World Bank-financed project nears expiry.

The Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT) project is an initiative by the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) partly funded by the World Bank – that aims to break up collective land titles covering 1.38 million hectares issued to over a million agrarian reform beneficiaries.

At a congressional budget hearing, Estrella said there are about 750,000 Collective Certificate of Land Ownership Awards (CCLOA) pending before DAR as the loan is set to expire in Dec. 2027.

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“We might make it at 500 [thousand], or a little less, for this year, and then finish the entire thing by next year,” he told lawmakers.

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READ: DAR: Decades-long farm lot distribution program may be completed in 2027

Estrella said the project “is still a priority” of DAR, as he touted that his agency is “one of the best, if not the best, agencies implementing World Bank-funded projects.”

Speaking to the Inquirer after the hearing, the agrarian reform secretary said breaking up CCLOAs “is easy.”

“If it were only up to us, we would finish this right now,” he said in Filipino. “It’s the World Bank slowing things down because they are strict in the use of funds.”

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Land reform is a contentious issue in the Philippines, an agricultural country where vestiges of Spanish colonial land ownership have endured for decades, concentrating land possession among a few. 

About 47 percent of the country’s total land area is agricultural land, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. /mr