MANILA, July 20 (NNN-ABN) – Philippines and the World Bank signed a 370-million U.S. dollar loan agreement, for a project to support Filipino farmers, the country’s Department of Finance (DOF) said today.
The project aims to speed-up the process of splitting about 1.4 million hectares of land, covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Programme (CARP) and then providing individual titles to these parcelised lots to some 750,000 farmer-beneficiaries.
In a statement, the DOF said, Philippine Finance Secretary, Carlos Dominguez and Achim Fock, who was then the World Bank’s acting country director for Brunei, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand, signed the loan agreement on July 14, for the Support to Parcelisation of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT) project of the Philippines’ Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR).
“The SPLIT project will improve the bankability of farmers and enable them to access credit and government assistance,” Dominguez said.
Dominguez added, the loan will support the Philippines’ economic recovery programme by intensifying assistance to farmers and making agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARB’s) more resilient to the economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fock, for his part, said, the World Bank expects the project to encourage ARB’s “to invest in their property and adopt better technologies for greater productivity and higher incomes.”
Under the project, the collective certificate of land ownership awards (CCLOA’s) will be parcelised into individual titles for some 750,000 ARB’s to help fulfil the completion of the decades-old CARP.
The government redistributed about 4.8 million hectares of land to some 2.8 million ARB’s under the agrarian reform programme, but only 53 percent were in the form of individual land titles.
The remaining 47 percent or about 2.5 million hectares are CCLOA titles that were issued to groups of ARB’s in the 1990’s as a temporary measure to fast-track the distribution of land to farmer-beneficiaries.
The parcelisation of the CCLOA’s into individual titles has been very slow, which is why about 1.4 million hectares remain to be subdivided among farmers under the SPLIT project.
The total cost of the SPLIT Project is 473.56 million U.S. dollars, of which 370 million U.S. dollars will be funded by the World Bank, while the government will provide the counterpart financing for the balance of 103.56 million U.S. dollars.
DOF said, the loan agreement for the project carries a 29-year maturity period, inclusive of a grace period of ten-and-a-half years.
