With the directives from no less than the Office of the President to expedite the distribution to Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries (ARBs) of their E-Titles, coming out of the World Bank Assisted Project SPLIT or the Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling, everyone congregates at the Department of Agrarian Reform.

Secretary Conrado M. Estrella III has given the marching orders to all concerned, especially the regional directors and the Foreign Assisted and Special Projects Office (FASPO), headed by Undersecretary Jesry Palmares, as well as the Project Implementation Officer (PIO) of Project SPLIT.

Project SPLIT aims to deliver to the ARBs the proof of ownership of the awarded land by subdividing the Collective CLOAS (Certificate of Land Ownership Awards) into individual titles. With their titles in hand, the social justice program in the agrarian sector will be completed, with the hope that our ARBs will bring out the best in terms of productivity from their awarded lands.

While it started earlier in the last quarter of 2020, the COVID pandemic intervened, causing setbacks in the critical milestones and the procurement of needed personnel and equipment.

However, in the last year of 2022, Project SPLIT resumed in earnest by deploying Field Validation Teams (FVTs) in 78 provinces with the hiring of more than 4,000 personnel to revisit around 138,000 Collective CLOAs that date back 20 years, involving 1.3 million hectares of awarded lands to 1.1 million farmer beneficiaries whose names were collectively annotated at the back of their Collective CLOAs.

The World Banks’ assistance of USD 370 million and the GOP’s counterpart of USD 103 million, for a total of USD 470 million, will finance the groundwork needed for Project SPLIT.

These will include a careful process of field validation of Collective CLOAs vis-à-vis the ARBs or their heirs, survey, and subdivision of allocated or awarded lands per beneficiary, up to the issuance of individual E-Titles. The passage of time will also have left loads of issues that may result in either the disqualification of existing landowners or the reallocation of land to new beneficiaries.

For the year 2023, the target is to distribute 140,000 E-Titles nationwide.

Project SPLIT calls for a multi-agency effort led by the DAR, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the Land Registration Authority (LRA), and the National Commission on Indigenous People (NCIP).