My unauthorized postmortem of CARP

While others may say that it is too premature to conduct a postmortem on why the Comprehensive Land Reform Program (CARP) failed, however I do believe that for all intents and purposes CARP is already dead because there has been no official extension by Congress as of June 11th regardless of what Congress under House Speaker Prospero Nograles said that because there is still money unspent for the budget of CARP, then CARP isn’t considered dead. Talk about the art of double speak that only a true blooded Traditional Politician sorely lacking of a political can say.

Yet the next day after the death of CARP, we still saw those one-page advertisements urging the President to call for a special session of Congress to pass the CARP Extension Law. These ads were signed by “Individuals” like Most Rev. Angel N. Lagdameo D.D. Archbishop of Jaro, Most Rev. Oscar Cruz Archbishop of Lingayen-Dagupan and Most Rev. Antonio J. Ledesma Archbishop of Cagayan de Oro and many others. I was really surprised that this time I did not read the name of our beloved Ricardo Cardinal Vidal who earlier supported the extension of CARP. Could it be that Cardinal Vidal finally realized that extending CARP meant the extension of the corruption and the inefficiency of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR)? I certainly hope so.

In that paid ad, most of the bishops who supported the extension of CARP no longer carried the name of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) and we can only second guess why this time around, they didn’t carry the banner of the CBCP, which they usually do. Could it be due to the fact that not all priests support the extension of CARP?

If there’s anyone to blame for the failure of CARP, the blame is squarely on the shoulders of the original creators of CARP. There is no doubt that CARP had a noble goal… but what we learned so much about life could be summed up in one quote from an author whose name escapes me, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions!” CARP was a noble inspired program for social justice; therefore, injustice should never have been part and parcel of its implementation. Sadly, CARP was riddled with injustice and corruption; this is why it failed from the very beginning especially when Tita Cory’s Hacienda Luisita was exempted from its implementation! 

CARP would have been successful if our lawmakers enacted a law that would have given land to the landless that was at the same time, fair and equitable to the landowners. Fairness and equity should be the essence of our laws. But instead CARP was confiscatory and it gave lands to the landless at the expense of the landowners who were paid very low prices for the land that they had tilled for most of their life… if they were paid at all! To date, some 270,000 landowners remain unpaid because of this injustice!

Then when CARP was launched, its implementer, the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) worsened this already inequitable law when they did not only give lands to the landless farmers, they also gave lands to anyone considered landless, worse of all they gave lands to underage children and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of corruption that plagued CARP!

To date, the DAR hasn’t given any satisfactory report as to what happened to CARP in its 20-year program. If we are all interested in getting an accounting of this, it is due to the fact that a huge chunk of the billions of pesos spent for CARP came from the ill-gotten Marcos wealth… from many sequestered companies, monies that were stolen and recovered and only to be stolen again by some small time corrupt bureaucrat in the DAR! This is why we must demand an accounting from the DAR! If we conducted a lifestyle check on those Municipal Agrarian Reform Officers (MARO) chances are good that we would find traces of the Marcos loot in their pockets!

But perhaps the worse sin that the DAR committed against the Filipino people is that, they gave away only the cultivated lands of many people who were already tilling these lands. In their desire to get the huge tracts of lands from the rich landowners, they did a grave injustice to the middle class farmer who tilled his land after serving the government for years. CARP should have given idle or uncultivated government lands to real farmers, then it would have really worked as a program.

Again, while Congress is once again in recess, it is time for us to remind our Congressmen to reflect deeply that if they vote for an extension of the same CARP that was enacted 20-years ago, we might not vote for them in the coming 2010 elections. CARP will no doubt be a major election issue or debate for the 2010 Presidential elections… if there will be a debate at all!

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For email responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.philstar.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow entitled, “Straight from the Sky” shown every Monday only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 on SkyCable at 8 in the evening.