Land titling in the country can be a long process. An application for a judicial confirmation of ownership involves a tedious and expensive process specifically when the ownership of the lot is being contested (as when ownership is contested among heirs). In the case of Free Patent, conveyance of the land is made only five years after issuance of title. The tedious titling system means that coverage can be subsequently delayed. The difficulties of coverage and the long process of land titling, on the one hand, and the need of DAR to provide land distribution outputs on the other, have led to the issuance of either collective titles or collective CLOAs (see Chapter 2). A collective CLOA is a certificate of title in the name of all the ARBs in the lot covered by the title but does not show the individual area awarded to each beneficiary. In all, collective CLOAs cover an area of 2.05 million hectares and account for about two-thirds of the total output of DAR. Since the beneficiaries of the CLOA have yet to define the lot area, payment on land cannot be made upon award of the title. This factor has contributed to the low rate of amortization by CARP beneficiaries.
II. Second Generation Implications of Land Administration and Management Issues a. Security of tenure. The beneficiaries of CARP obtain land rights and responsibilities upon award of CLT/EPs or CLOAs. However, although CLOAs and EPs are considered land titles and provide beneficiaries the formal legal rights on land, many of the CARP issued titles have not been perfected. “Imperfect titles” result from: (1) unsettled landownership issues on land covered by CARP specifically concerning untitled lands; (2) unsettled issues on “just compensation”; (3) unpaid landowners who cannot obtain payment due to the tedious re-documentation required; and, (4) the issuance of collective titles. A major consequence of a tile being imperfect is that the process for paying the land mortgage is legally blocked. Added to the problem of a traditional difficulty in recovering public loans, such a legal impediment has contributed to the massive evasion in the amortization of agrarian debt. In fact, only 10% of ARBs have either fully paid their lands or been regularly paying their amortizations to the Land Bank. This means that 90% of CLOAs issued under Land Bank accounts are in arrears. In principle, they can be subject to foreclosure.3 The situation differs across agrarian reform operating units of the Land Bank but the overall collection rate is still low at 25% (Table 81).
3
Based on the provisions of RA 6657 Section 26, the Land Bank can foreclose the properties of non-paying ARBs. This means that the Land Bank has legal rights over these properties
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