MAASIN CITY (PIA) — Farmers in Southern Leyte finally became owners of the parcels of land they had worked on through the land acquisition program of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR).
Vissa Arnela Villa, municipal agrarian reform officer, said during the recent Kapihan sa PIA, tenants became landowners in different parts of the province, including Barangay Hinapu Gamay, a mountain village in Maasin City.
In these areas, 19 hectares of titled land have been distributed to the farmers.
Another upland barangay, Tigbawan, Maasin City, covering some 266 hectares of previously timberland area, has been converted into alienable and disposable land and made available to more than 100 agrarian reform beneficiaries.
In Barangay Villa Jacinta, Macrohon, 94 hectares were covered, and there were already those who had fully paid the 30-year amortization through the Land Bank, Villa reported.
There were also 107 farmers who received land titles through the Certificates of Land Ownership Award (CLOA) during the visit of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in Tacloban City.
One was Jocelyn Bohol, 45, married with four children, from Barangay Katipunan, Malitbog, who thanked President Marcos Jr. and DAR Secretary Conrado Estrella III for the title for the eight hectares of land.
“With my seven siblings, we have long awaited this moment, this day, to come into our lives so that the land we inherited from our tenant father can have proper documents,” Bohol told the Philippine Information Agency in a quick interview to get her reaction to the event.
Bohol has pledged to increase the productivity of their land in response to the challenge from the president, stating that they will not sell the land.
In response to the president’s initiative to distribute more land titles by the end of the year, Villa stated that the office is currently in the process of recruiting teams to speed up the surveying of untitled lands.
This is intended to facilitate the distribution of titled lots to more Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries (ARBs).
In a related update, Febie Marie Bersabal, DAR information officer, mentioned at a Kapihan forum that their office also provides social infrastructure building, the provision of farm equipment and machinery, credit lending from Land Bank, and other support services through Agrarian Reform Beneficiary Organizations (ARBOs). (MMP, PIA Southern Leyte, with Febe Marie Bersabal, DAR Southern Leyte Information Officer)
