Land Reform, Rural Development, and Poverty in the Philippines: Revisiting the Agenda

DAR’s ODA portfolio is quite significant and has increased substantially since the ARC strategy was implemented. The Foreign Assisted Projects Office has reported that ODA assistance has directly benefited more than 1,078 ARCs and delivered support services to 649,420 ARBs. These development interventions focus on five major areas: physical infrastructure, community and institutional development, productivity and rural enterprise, basic social services, and land tenure improvement.

As of end of 2007, an aggregate amount of Php57.823 billion covering a total of 56 projects was generated. Of these, 42 projects are already completed while 14 projects are still ongoing implementation. On the other hand, the non-FAP ARCs have to rely on the regular Agrarian Reform Fund (ARF) appropriations of DAR and other agencies for financing development interventions. The funding is quite limited considering the scope and coverage of the nonFAP ARCs. Unlike its FAP counterparts, these ARCs did not receive the complete package of hardware and software interventions needed to ensure sustainable development. On DAR’s part, the bulk of interventions for these ARCs were technical assistance and facilitation for credit, infrastructure development, and social services delivery.

Owing to the fiscal constraint noted above, ARCs receiving support services through FAPs are expected to be better off than those without FAPs. b. Expansion strategies.

In addition to difficulties in providing adequate assistance to existing ARCs, DAR faces the issue of addressing the concerns of ARBs in the non-ARC barangays. Over the years, it has been confronted with this issue and some key strategies were adopted to increase the reach of developmental interventions to ARBs, whether through the ARC strategy or otherwise.

Among these are an ARC expansion strategy and a zonal strategy.

By the end of 1998, only 28% of total ARBs were covered by ARCs. This low reach of the ARC program prompted DAR to assess its current ARC strategy, particularly in the identification and selection of barangays to be launched as ARCs. In response to this, DAR issued Memorandum Circular (MC) No. 5, Series of 1999, rationalizing the selection of ARCs based on a scale intervention approach. This takes into consideration economic, ecosystem, and socio-political attributes in clustering barangays and determining the size of an ARC. Some key concepts of the ARC strategy were likewise revised based on DAR’s experience in implementing ARC development. DAR realized that a barangay does not provide the sufficient scale to be able to generate impact. In addition, the influence area of some key interventions like roads, bridges, and irrigation systems go beyond the ARC barangay. With this in mind, subsequent ARCs to be launched should range from a cluster of barangays, at the minimum, to at most, one entire municipality.

Likewise, ARC typologies or models were identified (prime, semi-prime, satellite) to align the development interventions to the attributes of these ARCs. The existing ARCs (a substantial number of them covering only one barangay) were expanded based on a set of criteria that takes into consideration the ARC typologies, their development potentials, and management control of DAR over the development process.

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