The “achievements” published by the Department of Agrarian Reform in its land distribution program are deceptive. The department report claimed having distributed 229,545 hectares of agricultural land to 186,290 beneficiaries. Under the World Bank’s SPLIT project, it claims to have issued 132,393 individual titles from collective CLOAs, covering 170,718 hectares. The regular land acquisition and distribution (LAD) program falsely claimed to have distributed 61,718 titles covering 58,828 hectares to farmers.

On the other hand, the department was deliberately silent on the millions of farmers who lost their land due to forcible evictions, cancellations of ownership and titles due to bankruptcy, and conversion of agricultural lands.

“Without addressing these realities, DAR’s statistics are misleading and do not reflect the worsening landlessness and suffering of farmers,” Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas chairperson and Makabayan senatorial candidate Danilo Ramos (Ka Daning) said. In fact, DAR still counted many farmers who have already lost their land in its list of beneficiaries under the bogus CARP.

The land distribution itself is also riddled with anomalies. In December 2024, the Commission on Audit revealed that many lands distributed are no longer cultivated or have been converted for commercial and residential use. Reports also emerged about DAR’s anomalous distribution to unqualified beneficiaries such as police officers, non-farmers, overseas Filipino workers, and even minors. COA also reported that DAR spent 97.94% of its LAD program budget but only achieved 32.94% of its target land distribution.

The KMP condemned DAR for promoting the SPLIT (Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling) program of the World Bank that fragmented collective CLOAs into individual CLOAs. According to the group, this only made individual farmers more vulnerable to poverty, land speculation, and land-use conversion.

According to KMP, DAR’s plan to distribute 400,000 hectares of land is meaningless amid the neoliberal and anti-farmer policies of the regime such as the Rice Liberalization Law.

“These policies have devastated local rice production, forcing farmers into debt and pushing many out of agriculture altogether,” Ka Daning said. Clearly, therefore, there is a contradiction in DAR’s claims that it supports agriculture when government policies continuously devastate farmers’ livelihoods.