Around 100,000 hectares of landholdings covered by a total of 13,604 Collective Certificates of Land Ownership Award (CLOAs) were excluded from the implementation of the World-Bank funded Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT) project.
These “problematic” landholdings have overlapping ancestral issues, or are the subject of ancestral domain claim by certain Indigenous Cultural Communities or Indigenous Peoples (IP).
Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) Secretary Conrado Estrella III has alerted field implementers of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) to be wary of lands suspected of having overlapping issues between agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) and IP communities in pursuit of their task of subdividing CCLOAs.
“Remember, time is of the essence. We cannot afford to be entangled in a complicated situation, which will only tie our hands by inadvertently covering lands that were partly or wholly owned by indigenous communities,” Estrella said in a statement.
Engr. Joey Sumatra, DAR Assistant Secretary for Policy, Planning and Research Office, who also serves as the national SPLIT project director, advised all field CARP implementers to exclude all lands with potential overlapping issues until the DAR and the National Commission for Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) issue the guidelines through a joint administrative order.
Sumatra has provided all field CARP implementers a list of 13,604 land titles, covering a combined area of 109,223 hectares nationwide, for their guidance.
Among the 15 DAR-recognized regional geographical areas, Davao (Region XI) has the most number of collective CLOAs with overlapping issues at 3,996, covering a combined area of 32,548 hectares, followed by Soccsksargen (Region XII), with 2,718 titles covering 24,691 hectares, and Northern Mindanao (Region X), with 2,281 titles covering 20,298 hectares.