Byline: MELODY M. AGUIBA

The government is being urged to develop idle public lands and consolidate agrarian lands if agriculture is to serve as a jump-off point for the Philippines economic take-off.

Agriculture secretary Arthur C. Yap said the private sector has been prodding

"(San Miguel Corp. Chairman Eduardo) Danding (Cojuangco) told me that if youre really serious with it, you should find the means to use seven to eight million hectares of government land for lease," Yap said in an interview.

Nelson C. Buenaflor, president and chief executive officer of state credit firm Quedan and Rural Credit Guarantee Corp. (QRCGC), said land consolidation is a top requirement to agricultural development.

In line with this, the Department of Agriculture (DA) is eyeing the development of seven to eight million hectares of government-owned idle lands for lease to farmers as part of a six-year goal of maximizing agricultural development, according to Yap.

"Anywhere I go, the problem is the same, land reform."

Yap said that since it is extremely difficult to reform CARL because of the political implications of taking back a policy of land distribution to the poor, he said government needs to consolidate land so as to make fragmented lands contiguous.

This specially applies in high value, highly-exportable crops (banana, banana chip, processed tropical fruits) such as palm oil plantation where a 4,000-hectare contiguous land is essential to build a viable palm oil processing plant.

"We need a bigger land to be viable. Theres no need to put up a farm without a processing plant because the palm oil has to be processed within several hours from harvest. It has to be 4,000 hectares within the radius. Its not really a consolidation of land ownership but of position, of production," he said in an interview.

CARL, which limits maximum ownership of agricultural land to five hectares, has severely impeded farm development and even caused farm industries, including rubber, banana, and cocoa farms, to collapse over the last two decades since CARLs implementation.

To consolidate land, Buenaflor said government can choose three modes a lease contract, a management contract, or consolidation through assembly of several functions. A lease contract, he said, may involve a 20-year contract where farmers lease his land and gets paid for his land.

A management contract, he said, may involve a cooperative where the farmer himself works on the land, supervises the farm, and receives a certain percentage of the farm production while a cooperative manager provides direct link-up of the farm cooperative to an exporter and provides inputs fertilizers, planting materials, and the technology.

"The management contract is based on technology, markets, and the technical side like the selection of planting materials. There is a sharing of a certain percentage of the volume or produce like a number of bananas in a box," he said.

The third mode may involve an assembler similar to what QRCGC and Land Bank of the Philippines presently have with its current borrowers where an assembler provides inputs (planting materials, fertilizers) and credits to farmers and also directly connects the farm production to an exporter. The assembler provides for primary processing of the product prior to transportation to a main processor or exporter. The assembly may also involve small farmers direct access to exporters.

Buenaflor said that governments intervention in consolidation involves its coordination with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and a local government unit (LGU) in determining how the land can be disposed of.

"They have to identify the land and conduct land classification. The DENR tells you the disposition form of the land because some of the lands may be forest land, pasture land, and grassland. Once the land is identified, government can now go to crops development and provide extension to the farms providing the seedlings and planting materials and the technology on how to propagate crops," he said.