GMA lists two ‘weakest links’

President Arroyo said yesterday the "weakest links" of her administration are agrarian reform and the provision of low-cost housing, with 100,000 houses and 200,000 hectares of land still to be distributed.

"So what’s the missing link?" she said. "The missing link is the in-between. The conduit banks have been very conservative. Why? So we have to address the why and part of the solution to that is... the government has to pay... There are certain guarantees that they (financial institutions) can have, (so) the banks can finance. That’s rent-to-own."

The two centerpiece projects were "not on track" in terms of implementation although funds are already available, she said.

Mrs. Arroyo said the task of distributing 100,000 low-cost houses has been assigned to Secretary Michael Defensor, chairman of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC), who is being groomed to head the proposed Department of Housing.

On the other hand, Mrs. Arroyo said Agrarian Reform Secretary Hernani Braganza, who was confirmed by the Commission on Appointments before the Christmas holidays, was given the job of distributing 100,00 hectares of public and private agricultural land to landless farmers.

Mrs. Arroyo said "bottlenecks in the bureaucracy" are delaying her administration’s housing and agrarian reform programs, which she spelled out in her State of the Nation Address last July.

The President said Defensor and Braganza worked with representatives of business, labor urban poor, farmers and other "civil society" groups to unlock the bureaucratic bottlenecks one by one.

"In fact, the (National Socio-economic Summit last Dec. 10) examined some of the problems of implementation of the SONA," she said.

"For instance, the 100,000 houses for the working class that we want to build, it’s behind schedule now. And it’s not because there is no money, because the money is in government financial institutions. "That’s why I gave numbers because that’s what (we could finance with) the money but it doesn’t find the way from the GFIs to the developers."

Mrs. Arroyo said on the part of agrarian reform, the Land Bank of the Philippines has been doing commercial banking, which is not part of its mandate under the law to finance the government’s land reform program.

"Leaving little money for land reform, the very original purpose (for the bank’s establishment,)" she said.