TACLOBAN CITY – The Department of Agrarian Reform - Leyte provincial office (DARPO) is set to deploy additional geodetic engineers to expedite land surveys as the deadline for Project SPLIT draws near.

DAR Leyte provincial officer Roderick Rances said there are still at least 13,000 hectares covered by motherland titles that need to be split into individual titles for distribution to agrarian reform beneficiaries before the end of the year.

DARPO said it will mobilize an engineering task force beefed up with an additional 21 geodetic engineers from its organic personnel and project-hired technical experts to execute the province-wide push.

Project SPLIT, or the Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling, is a project funded by the World Bank that started in 2020 which aims to subdivide 1.38 million hectares of collective land titles into individual titles before the end of 2027.

Initially, the project was set to end in 2024, but a three-year extension was given due to the delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the rigorous documentation needed to validate land boundaries.

Among those up for parcelization is a 402.5148-hectare property formerly owned by Margarita Agro-Industrial Corporation (MAIC) in San Isidro town, which was awarded by a collective Certificate of Land Ownership Award (CCLOA) in 1999.

DAR said that many of the original 287 agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) listed in the CCLOA had abandoned or sold their lots, or were no longer tilling the land.

Rances had given assurance to the present farmers who have been actually cultivating the parcels for years that they will not be displaced and that individual e-titles will not be issued based on an outdated list.

Rances has ordered the field personnel to aggressively document actual tillers and resolve disqualification cases right at the source to ensure that every surveyed lot is legally airtight before the list is submitted to the Registry of Deeds.