In practice, the DAR provides legal advice but not lawyers to defend farmers or DAR officials in court cases. There is a legal fund which DAR personnel can avail of for legal defense, but some say that this is insufficient. The situation is worse for farmers and workers, as they cannot afford the legal costs. Meanwhile, the legal staff in local DAR offices seem inadequate for coping with the growing number of cases, especially in provinces with high LAD balances and strong landowner resistance. On support services for Program Beneficiaries Development (PBD) Agrarian reform beneficiaries consist of former tenants, farmworkers, seasonal workers and landless. Most are poor and in debt, and thus need external support to make their lands productive and profitable. Table 7 shows the summary accomplishments in PBD in the past 30 years of CARP. Based on DAR data, only 53 percent of existing ARBs had access to a package of support services (credit, farm to market road, post-harvest facilities, access to market, extension services, equipment). These ARBs are part of the 2,216 Agrarian Reform Communities (ARCs) or the Agrarian Reform Community Cluster (ARCC) areas. Most of support services were financed through loans and grants under foreign-assisted projects implemented by DAR. Some ARBs were able to avail themselves of specific support services like credit, extension services, farm inputs, post-harvest facilities, irrigation from DAR and implementing agencies, but not the whole package and on consistent basis. The problem is the overall lack of mechanisms at the national and local levels for the effective delivery of support services to ARBs and small farmers. As the Department of Agriculture (DA) is a devolved agency, the work of agriculture extension has been transferred to LGUs who often lack the needed budget and personnel for the task. Moreover, most of the support service windows of the government can be availed of only by ARB organizations (ARBOs) but not by individual ARBs. RA 9700 attempted to address the lack of support services to individual ARBs by mandating the provision of initial capital to new ARBs, but this was not implemented. Today there are socialized credit programs for ARBs – i.e., the Agrarian Production Credit Program (APCP), the Sikat-Saka of Land Bank and the Accessible and 48 Status of Land and Resource Tenure Reform in the Philippines 2018

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