TACLOBAN CITY — The Department of Agrarian Reform provincial office in Leyte said it is almost done with the validation of agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) that will get individual titles to parcels of land that were covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law.

Alsmith Soria, DAR regional information officer in Eastern Visayas, said 10,669 landholdings with an aggregate area of 93,940.1486 hectares will be covered by the individual titling that the agency is implementing under the Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT) project.

Soria said the World Bank-funded SPLIT project aims to subdivide collective land titles into individual land titles to improve land tenure security and property rights of agrarian reform beneficiaries.

Soria said three field validation teams were recently dispatched to Barangay Kagbana in Burauen town. This is the remotest upland village in any municipality in Leyte. The teams are tasked to validate some 229 agrarian reform beneficiaries who were previously issued a collective Certificate of Land Ownership Award (CLOA).

Kagbana village, which is about 25 kilometers away from the town proper, is home to over a dozen of Mamanwa indigenous people who rely on subsistence agriculture.

Under the SPLIT project, landholdings covered by collective CLOAs are subdivided and electronically generated individual land titles are eventually issued to ARBs.