By CHRIS V. PANGANIBAN
PROSPERIDAD, Agusan del Sur— About 2,687 farmers in the five provinces of the Caraga region formally received yesterday individual land titles covering 4,505 hectares of lands during a nationwide simultaneous awarding event marking the signing of President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. of Republic Act No. 11953 or the New Agrarian Emancipation Act yesterday.
According to the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), the new Law condones a total of PhP57.56 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.
Held here at the provincial capitol’s Datu Lipus Makapandong Cultural Center, the new Agrarian Reform titleholders came all the way from their respective home provinces to claim their documents in the company of their mayors, other local government officials and DAR’s municipal agrarian program officers.
Of the 4,505 hectares CARP lands in the region which will also benefit the new agrarian reform law covers a total of 2,687 ARBS individually receiving a total of 2,890 land titles. This covers a total of 4,202 electronic titles (e-Titles) and 254 regular Certificate of Land Ownership Award (CLOA).
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. The eTitle is a result of the LRA’s Land Titling Computerization Project in 2008.
These titles were released through DAR’s Support for Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT), a project which aims to fast-track the parcelization of agricultural landholdings covered under the agrarian reform program.
Dinagat Island Governor Nilo Demerey showed up to support his province’s ARBS even it has only 142 recipients for the 153 hectares of land covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, the second in the region with the least of the listed new land titleholders.
Many mayors from the different towns of Caraga region, however, 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 are already annotated at the back of the document to show that it is already covered by Republic Act No. 11953.
Capinpuyan said the titleholders can use their documents as collateral when they seek 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 their farms that will be inherited by their children and grandchildren,” was her reminder to the new land titleholders.
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