Concerns about massive conversion of agricultural land were raised by a number of civil society organizations working in agrarian reform, on grounds that with more than half a million farmers due to get titles to the lands they have been tilling for decades under the New Agrarian Emancipation Act, it will now become easier for them to sell to developers dangling high price tags for their land.
They added that the new law was “eerily silent” about preventing the sale of agricultural lands to the “usual landowners who would then reconsolidate the farms under their control.” “As long as there’s Article XIII, Section 4 [in the Constitution] which says that it’s a policy of the State to make the landless farmer and landless regular farmworker owners of the land they till—there our agrarian reform mandate will always be,” Pangulayan said.
Pangulayan said DAR also aims to push for the economic empowerment of farmers through agricultural productivity, profitability and rural development.For Speaker Martin Romualdez, the new law writing off the unpaid obligations of some 610,000 agrarian reform beneficiaries, most of whom are rice farmers, would raise production of the staple and thus contribute to the country’s rice sufficiency.