agricultural. While the law is intended to benefit agricultural lessees and share tenants, their chances of getting a larger share of the reformed area will depend on their ability to organize their sector and fight for their welfare. She also emphasized that the main losers of the CARL are the landless rural farm workers who have neither farms to rent nor permanent employment in plantations.
4.4.2 ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPLEMENTATION OF CARP Adriano, in her study entitled “DAR, Land Reform-Related Agencies and the CARP: Government and Alternative Approaches to Land Acquisition and Distribution”, mentioned that several factors contributing to the poor performance of CARP in land distribution include: a) the slow pace in land survey process; b) backlogs in land registration; c) lack of support from landowners largely because of the slow processing of and low payment for their land; and d) cumbersome land acquisition and distribution process for each land type. There are also features of the LAD that were created to discourage rent-seeking activities. These include: a) numerous documents required in various phases; b) the difficulty in the coordination of land-reform-related activities by various agencies; and c) the multi-layered countercheck systems. These features however affected the speedy enforcement of land reform causing also decentralization in the decision-making process. She mentioned further that DAR’s sluggish performance in land acquisition and distribution was a consequence more of the slow development in the land acquisition process than on the distribution component. One factor causing slow acquisition is the problem of limited funds. To address this, LAD and not non-LAD activities should be prioritized in budgeting while personnel staff has to be streamlined and re-aligned to bring down personnel costs. Another way of evaluating the performance of CARP in uplifting the quality of life of its beneficiaries is looking at its effect on their income and productivity. A paper by Bravo et al (2000) on the current state of Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries found out that the average household income of the ARB households are low and generally just enough to meet the minimum basic needs of the household members. More than half of the income already comes from non-farm sources. Poverty incidence remains high at 63 percent, even higher than the national rural poverty incidence. She further noted that the farms of the ARBs are relatively small (less than 2 hectares) and mostly rainfed in lowland and upland areas and most of the farms operate with limited area of mechanization and meager amount spent on material inputs for farm operations. This is one reason why agricultural income remains to be very low and limited (Bravo et al 2000). A study done by Geron (1994) on the effect of CARP on the productivity of coconut and sugar in the Negros area emphasized that the mere transfer of land ownership and its operation in smaller parcels without the corresponding adoption of appropriate production technology had no impact on productivity. She also stressed the importance of sustainable credit delivery for CARP’s beneficiaries. Since money from the Agrarian Reform Fund (ARF) has lower cost allowing LBP to provide credit to ARBs at lower rates, the program may not be able to sustain this in the future.
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