Success and Failures of

CARP and CARPER

CARP:

Key to national development the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform

Program (CARP) is in the news again. Various efforts are being waged by the
Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines and civil society organizations,
like Task Force Mapalad and the Rural Poor Institute for Land and Human Rights
Services, for another CARP extension.

There are two streams of thought with respect to CARP. The first concludes that
CARP is a failure and needs to be ended. The second argues that CARP has its
fair share of accomplishments and needs to be extended with some reforms.

The first group wants to junk CARP but disagrees on the future of redistributive
reforms. A more radical faction demands an end to the current CARP and the
passage of the genuine agrarian reform bill. Finally, a group of big landowners is
simply determined to end CARP.

CARP started in 1988 with the passage of Republic Act No. 6657, otherwise
known as the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law. It was signed into law by
President Corazon Aquino on June 10, 1988. The Department of Agrarian Reform
(DAR) was created to implement CARP.

CROP failure is perhaps the most dreaded of all agricultural pursuits. Farmers can
only watch helplessly and imagine the cost of the collapse of their income,
plans and investments. They can decide on two things – replant or abandon the
enterprise. In most instances the farmers continue to cultivate believing that a
new effort will give enough to recover their losses. When there is hope, there is
possibility of recovery. The farmers are mostly fatalistic but they have faith in
God’s providence.

On the other hand if there is no more hope and cultivating further will only mire
them in greater penury and misery then farmers take a different route, like a shift
to other crops and begin anew or let go of the land. This is the same with the
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. There is CARP failure, so to speak not
only for the beneficiaries but even the militants whose members are wont to
forcibly take over the land before the Department of Agrarian Reform has
declared that every legal requirement had been complied with and the land is
ready for distribution.
CARPER:

Almost twenty-six years of implementation, still counting and with

completion nowhere near in sight. This amount of time that the Philippine
government has taken to implement and complete the key provisions of the
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) law translates to a whole
generation of Filipinos, including children of farmers, who have been born at the
time of the law’s passage, have grown up through the years of tentative and
unfinished implementation, and reaching adulthood amid current intensified
clamor for government to complete its task.

CARP is now the longest running program being implemented under a

democratic political system, post-EDSA 1986. It has been widely seen as the
litmus test of past and present administrations’ commitment to social justice, as
mandated by the 1987 Philippine Constitution. CARPER or Republic Act 9700,
signed 7 August 2009, gave the original Republic Act 6657 or CARP five more
years to be completed. In 1998, CARP’s land acquisition and distribution
component had been given its first 10-year extension and additional funding of
PhP 50 billion through Republic Act 8532.

One of the main goals during the extension period should be the
completion of land distribution by June 30, 2014. The program should get PhP
150 billion for five years or PhP 30 billion per year for land acquisition and
distribution and agrarian justice delivery (a total of 60 percent share for the two
components), and for support services (40 percent). CARPER introduced other
meaningful reforms articulated by farmers and rural women’s organizations,
agrarian reform advocates, and the Catholic Church. These measures aim to
address loopholes in CARP and problems that have arisen from its
implementation and which have beset the program since its inception more
than two decades ago.