IFAD funds $66-million DA project in CAR

MANILA, Philippines - The Department of Agriculture (DA) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) have signed an aide memoire signaling the start of a $66-million (roughly P3.05 billion) village-level development program for the Cordillera Administrative Region.

The aid memoire was signed Monday by Agriculture Undersecretary for Operations Jesus Emmanuel M. Paras and IFAD country program manager Sana F.K. Jatta.

The project will cover 170 barangays in 37 towns of six provinces in the central highlands of Northern Luzon. It aims to help upland villages improve their own community development plans, identify specific projects to realize those plans and then pursue those projects using IFAD and DA funds.

Specific projects will focus on reforestation, agricultural productivity and rural infrastructure which will be devoted to building farm to market roads, community-based irrigation systems, and development of village-level potable water system.

To get the project on full gear, Paras said a special release order for the P170.8-million DA counterpart fund and loan proceeds has been approved.

The IFAD, for its part, has released $1.5 million working fund or roughly P72 million. The IFAD fund was a soft loan to the Philippine government.

Since the IFAD mission last March this year, the project implementers reported that the machinery to implement the project from the Cordillera Regional Office of the Department of Agriculture to the village levels has been set.

Agreements with the governors of the six covered provinces have been signed while agreements with 18 out of the 37 covered towns were entered into.

A separate agreement has been reached between the DA and the National Commission for Indigenous People (NCIP) for the latter to issue ancestral land titles to private properties of the covered barangays and domain titles for communal lands.

Since 97 of the targeted barangays are newly-organized, the project will give those new local government units a fresh start at charting their own development with financial and technical backing from the IFAD-DA partners, Paras said.