‘Parcelization’ of agrarian lands gets funding support from World Bank
About a tenth of large tracts of land awarded to agrarian reform beneficiaries have been made ready for registration and titling with the help of a World Bank loan.
In a report last week, the Washington-based World Bank said that so far, 132,210 hectares of land benefiting 82,920 agrarian reform beneficiaries were already up for registration under the Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (Split) project.
To recall, the World Bank extended in 2020 a $370-million loan to split collective land titles covering over 1.3 million hectares of property earlier on turned over to about 750,000 agrarian reform beneficiaries in the Philippines.
Two years into loan implementation, the World Bank said “the updating of the collective certificate of land ownership award (CLOA) inventory has found approximately 1,283,525 hectares of land that is workable.”
The World Bank said the Split project currently being implemented by the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) already established project implementation structures and institutional arrangements, on top of field validation works in the three pilot regions, namely: Ilocos Region, Eastern Visayas and Zamboanga Peninsula.
Land database
The project also shepherded the development of digital forms to support the inventory process, alongside putting in place a temporary information technology system, the World Bank said.
Earlier World Bank documents had shown that the Split project aimed to subdivide or “parcelize” 1,368,900 hectares of land in 78 provinces across the country’s 15 regions. Citing DAR figures, the World Bank had said over 4.9 million hectares of land were distributed to over three million small-scale farmers between 1988 and 2018, of which about 45 percent of the titles were CLOAs.
In the past, DAR had difficulty breaking down CLOAs into individual titles as the process had been cumbersome. Issuing individual titles will give farmers not only clarity but also legal proof of the land they own or occupy, hence improving land tenure security and stabilizing property rights of agrarian reform beneficiaries, according to the World Bank. INQ
