Greetings!
Thank you for inviting me to keynote this Conference on Sustainable Land Governance and for the great support the USAID has been extending to help refine our policies in this area. This conference will help bring our own experts abreast with the state of the art in land governance.
I will be the first to admit our policies regarding land governance are in urgent need for updating. In fact, my wife just reminded me this morning that I had to attend to the land titling of her family’s piece of property in Tuguegarao this has been pending for I think 15 years. So on top of orders I get from the president I also get orders from my wife, as many of you I know do but would not admit. For many years, a National Land Use Plan has been sitting in the legislative mill with little indication it will be passed into law any time soon.
We need to bring coherence to the conflicting provisions between remedial pieces of legislation such as the Indigenous People’s Rights Act and existing property rights. We need a clear policy regarding habitation in danger zones. We need to rethink agrarian reform in the light of the continuing backwardness of our agriculture.
Recently, the Department of Finance has begun to design a program to reduce estate taxes to encourage documentation of land assets and free them up for productive use. We are encouraging the local government units to update their land valuations as a measure to discourage idle land as much as to improve public revenues.
The Philippines, being an archipelago, has less arable land per unit of population than Vietnam, Indonesia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Our farms and cities are built in narrow strips between shore and mountainside. Our farms are small. Our cities are congested. There is severe shortage of land to build homes. A happy compromise will have to be found between the demands of agriculture and the requirements of an increasingly urban population.
As our population increased rapidly over the last few decades, with our land policies hardly keeping pace, the phenomenon of landlessness has become more severe. Settlements are pushed to the most perilous places: steep slopes prone to landslides; shorelines prone to storm surges; and riverbanks that have become clogged. We need to plan for our settlements, addressing a housing backlog estimated at well over 3 million units.
There is so much to be done to ensure optimal use of our scarce land resources. Over the next few years, we will see intensifying competition for land from commercial developers, agricultural estates, industrial and export-processing zones as well as extractive industries. The competition will likely encourage land prices to spiral unless we improve land governance. If land becomes too expensive, it will be inaccessible to the homeless and raise the costs of production thereby diminishing our competitiveness.
Metro Manila presents us with the most severe case of poor land governance. This is an urban nightmare, a metropolis that grew without planning. Right now, high land costs prevent us from acquiring property to build schools and hospitals. Right-of-way has become a costly proposition for public works. No provisions were put in place for road widening. The situation inhibits government response to the worsening problems associated with urban congestion.
Unless we are able to rapidly upgrade our land governance, the fate that befell this choked metropolitan area will befall other areas in of our archipelago including Davao City where I am from. For this reason, this conference is timely. I hope the policymakers attending this meeting will learn from the experiences of others and help upgrade our own land governance capacity.
I hope this meeting will arrive at a set of practical recommendations on what can be done immediately. Many of our settlements are vulnerable. Our cities are congested. Our forested areas have become stripped to make way for human habitation. We are truly facing a land governance crisis and must respond decisively to this.
In closing, let me wish you a productive two days of meetings. Be assured our government is fully aware of the problems and we are ready to build up planning capacity to address it.
Let me again thank the USAID for the valuable support you have extended to raise awareness of this problem and educate our planners on best practices.
Thank you very much.