2 Negros solons push bill to save agri exports
BACOLOD CITY -- Rep. Alfredo Marañon III (Neg. Occ., 2nd District) and Rep. Jeffrey Ferrer, (Neg. Occ., 4th District) have proposed a compromise bill purposely to save the country's traditional agricultural export industries from collapse.
House Bill 5038 seeks to amend section 10 of Republic Act 6657 otherwise known as Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law by exempting lands actually, directly and exclusively used for production of agricultural products for export purposes such as bananas, pineapples, sugar and coconuts, except those already covered by the program prior to the possible amendment of the new law.
Rep. Marañon III, who is the chairman of the House Committee on Aquaculture and Fisheries, said in order to be competitive in the global market we have to adopt the time-tested dictum of economy of scale.
The solons said their idea is in consonance with Speaker Prospero Nograles' call for the consolidation of perfecting amendments to the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law especially the debate on extension which is under interpellation by plenary.
House Bill 5038 is now referred to the Committee on Agrarian Reform and pending since September 08, 2008.
"R.A. 6657 was enacted in 1988 first and foremost to increase agricultural production, trim down poverty and enhancing the dignity and quality of life of farmers and farm workers and to uphold rural development and industrialization," Ferrer told The News Today.
The Department of Agrarian Reform, the implementing arm of CAR Law envisioned a nation where there is equitable land ownership and empowered agrarian reform beneficiaries who are effectively managing their economic and social development for a quality of life but it is already 20 years old and government spent at least P130 billion pesos but it seems people were not contented wherein hundreds of poor farmers died battling for the land the time they received their CLOA as the landowners also clamor for delayed payments of acquired lands.
DAR's mission as the lead implementer of agrarian reform for sustainable rural development in the countryside through land tenure improvement and provision of integrated development services to landless farmers, farmworkers and small landowner-cultivators, and the delivery of agrarian justice, though very good to hear, according to Ferrer, but in the grassroots there is something to meditate upon for the achievement of its real purpose when it was conceptualized twenty years ago.