PROSPERIDAD, Agusan del Sur (MindaNews / 8 July) — A total of 2,687 farmers from the five provinces of Caraga Region on Friday received individual land titles and Certificates of Land Ownership Award (CLOA) covering 4,505 hectares of lands from the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR).
The new titleholders received their documents during a program held at the provincial capitol’s Datu Lipus Makapandong Cultural Center here. They were accompanied by local government officials and municipal agrarian program officers.
The awarding, a simultaneous nationwide event, coincided with the signing by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of Republic Act No. 11953 or the New Agrarian Emancipation Act.
DAR said the new law condones a total of P57.56 billion of unpaid amortizations from the principal debt incurred by around 600,000 agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) cultivating 1.173 million hectares of land across the country.
The ARBs in the region received a total of 2,890 land titles, of which 2,636 were electronic or e-titles covering 4,202 hectares, and 254 were CLOAs covering 303 hectares.
An e-title is a digitized form of a landowner’s paper land title. These land titles are backed up regularly and stored in its electronic original form in a virtual Registry of Deeds. It is a result of the Land Registration Authority’s Land Titling Computerization Project in 2008.
These titles were released through DAR’s Support for Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling, a P20.4-billion World Bank-funded project which aims to fast-track the parcelization of agricultural landholdings covered under the agrarian reform program.
Dinagat Island Gov. Nilo Demerey showed up to support his province’s ARBS even if it has only 142 recipients for the 153 hectares of land covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, which started in 1988.
Many mayors from the different towns of the region also came to boost the morale of the new ARBs in their respective towns.
Lawyer Merlita Capinpuyan, DAR Caraga regional director, said all the individual titles were already annotated to show that they are covered by RA 11953.
Capinpuyan said the titleholders may use their documents as collateral in applying for a bank loan only if they will use it as additional capital to improve their farms aside from the support services from DAR.
“I hope that they sustainably care for their farms that will be inherited by their children and grandchildren,” she added. (Chris V. Panganiban/MindaNews)
