MANILA – President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on Friday signed a law extending the government’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Programme (CARP) for another five years with an allocation equivalent to $300 million.
The President signed the law in the town of Plaridel, Bulacan province in Central Luzon which, Malacanang said, is a historic and memorable site for Carp, the government’s flagship programme to help improve the lives of millions of landless farmers.
Malacanang explained that on August 6, 1963, the President’s father, the late president Diosdado Macapagal, signed the Agrarian Reform Code which was passed by the Senate and the House of Representatives despite strong opposition from the landlords and their supporters who dominated in particular the lower chamber.
Although it became a law, Congress, however, Congress did not allocate funds for its mandatory implementation.
“That’s the historical significance of the signing,†said Secretary Nasser Pangadaman of the Department of Agrarian Reform who attended the ceremony along with other ranking officials and lawmakers, headed by Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile as well Senators Francis Pangilinan and Gregorio Honasan, who were the principal sponsors of the Carp version in the Senate.
Pangandaman stressed the reform measures incorporated in the law aim to weather the challenges of sustaining the gains of agrarian reform and ensuring progress in the countryside.
While in Plaridel, President Arroyo also launched several programmes for the farmer beneficiaries and agrarian reform communities in Central Luzon.
These included a project which carries the acronym “Punla†(Harvest) that focuses on the delivery of support services for the beneficiaries and phase 3 of the Agrarian Reform Infrastructure Project that is concerned with the building of farm-to-market roads, among others.
The new Carp law is an enrolled copy of the report finalized by the bicameral conference committee of representatives of the Senate and the House, which resolved the conflicting provisions of the bills passed by the two chambers.
The House ratified the bill on July 29, two days after President Arroyo urged lawmakers to approve the measure in her state-of-the-nation address to the joint session of Congress on July 27.
On the other hand, the Senate ratified the bill on August 3 in honor of the late president Corazon Aquino who died on August 1 after a losing battle of more than one year with colon cancer.
It was Mrs. Aquino who revived and signed in June 1988 the new Carp law after the programme had lain idle for more than 20 years because there were no funds allocated for its implementation.
To achieve its aim, the law allocated funds, including the money to be recovered by the government from the ill-gotten wealth of the late Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos and his cronies.
Under the new law, the $300 million allocated will be used, among others, for the compulsory acquisition of agricultural lands not yet covered for distribution to about 1.2 million Filipino farmers from July 1, 2009 to June 13, 2004.
The Carp law signed by Mrs. Aquino in 1988 expired on December 30, 2008.
For a time, however, proponents of the law extending the programme expressed fear it would not be passed by the House due to strong opposition from landlords, headed by Congressman Ignacio Arroyo of Negros Occidental province in the Visayas, the brother-in-law of President Arroyo.
Congressman Arroyo is the brother of the President’s husband lawyer Jose Miguel Arroyo whose family owns vast tracts of land in Negros Occidental.
The Arroyo tenants disclosed that when the President took over Malacanang in 2001, she promised to have the Arroyo family landholdings covered by Carp for eventual distribution to them.
But for the past nine years, President Arroyo failed to fulfill her promise, the tenants lamented.
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