BACOLOD CITY — Hundreds of landless farmers besieged the Department of Agrarian Reform in South Negros and demanded full land distribution under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.
They held a noise barrage at the DAR office to dramatize their fury at the failure of the agency to speed up land distribution. “This inter-agency dialogue had been reset four times since August. They seem to have all kinds of excuses to avoid meeting us despite their very low rate of accomplishment in land distribution,” Task Force Mapalad President Alberto Jayme said in a statement sent to the regional newspaper Mindanao Examiner.
DAR South Negros distributed only 454 hectares as of July 2013 out of its target of 7,590 hectares for the entire year.
TFM South Negros farmers slammed DAR for performing badly even as it has been beefed up with additional personnel, officials and all the needed equipment.
Lucresia Taburnay, Provincial Agrarian Reform Officer for Negros Occidental South, allegedly snubbed farmers for the fourth time since August and would not talk to them, saying she had to attend a training session along with her staff.
The farmers slammed Taburnay for this, saying that apparently, she does not care about the complaints of the farmers, who said CARP expires in June 2014 and land distribution must be hastened by these absentee local DAR officials.
President Beningo Aquino has promised TFM farmers during a dialogue in Malacanang in June 2012 that he would complete CARP until the end of his term in 2016.
The CARP backlog in the whole of Negros Island zoomed to 145,000 hectares since President Aquino took over Malacanang in 2010.
Since 2010, the Aquino administration was only able to distribute a measly 7,565 hectares out of the four-year target of 81,330 hectares.
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