THE chair of the House committee on agriculture yesterday
solicited the support of Catholic bishops for the extension of the life of the
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) for another five to seven years
while the House speaker called not just for an extension but the purging of the
program's defects.
Rep. Kahlil Abraham Mitra (NPC, Palawan) appealed to Manila
Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales and Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Vidal to help him and
his co-sponsors to elicit public support for the House Bills 328 and 3369 which
are still pending before his committee. "The support will surely help fast-track
the approval of pending measures to extend CARP," he said.
Mitra said the House needs to prioritize the CARP extension
bills because the CARP law is set to lapse on June 10, 2008.
"Let's put all our coordinated acts together to ensure the
extension of CARP in the next few more years," he said. "Importanteng
madugtungan ang buhay ng CARP upang maipagpatuloy ang pamamahagi pa ng mas
marami at malawak na lupain sa mga benepisyunaryo."
Speaker Prospero Nograles said the extension of CARP should
be used as an opportunity to ensure food security and not to create more
subdivisions and golf courses.
"The defect of the CARP is that it shrunk our farmlands
because even arable lands were converted by their owners into residential areas,
golf courses and industrial areas. We can extend CARP only if conversions will
no longer be allowed and allow the promotion of corporate farming," he said.
The Speaker said the many failures in the implementation of
the CARP were due to the absence of a mechanism that would ensure the
productivity of farmer beneficiaries.
"Many farmer-beneficiaries of agrarian reform used their seed
capital to buy new TVs and refrigerators instead of using the money to modernize
their farms," he said. "On the other hand, owners of vast tracts of land found a
way out to exempt themselves from CARP by converting their lands into industrial
and residential lands. This practice should be stopped or we will again fail in
achieving the real purpose of the CARP."
According to the Department of Agrarian Reform, there are still two million
hectares of land that have yet to be placed under the agrarian reform program
and it will take another 10 years before these can be fully distributed to
farmer-beneficiaries. So far, CARP has distributed seven million hectares of
land to around four million farmers. - Wendell Vigilia
