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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Affidavit of loss enough for lost land titles—DAR

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Landowners and agrarian reform claimants who have lost their certificates of land titles can simply present an affidavit of loss to be able to proceed with their transactions.

An affidavit of loss is enough for lost duplicate copies of land titles, the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) said.

DAR’s regional and provincial offices can proceed with the registration of electronic certificates of land ownership award (CLOAs) under the Support to Parcelization of Land for Individual Titling (SPLIT) even without the owners’ duplicate copies of land titles. 

“An affidavit of loss will do,” Assistant Secretary for Policy, Planning and Research Joey Sumatra said.

Sumatra, who is also the SPLIT national project director, advised officials to execute affidavits of loss and insert them as attachments among the documents required for the subdivision of collective CLOAs.

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The presentation of affidavits of loss in lieu of the owner’s duplicate copies of land titles was recommended by Gerardo Sirios, administrator of the Land Registration Authority.

DAR is exhausting all means to expedite the processing of e-individual titles for distribution to agrarian reform beneficiaries, who are members of farmers’ cooperatives to whose names the collective CLOAs are referred to.

Previous DAR administrations preferred the distribution of collective CLOAs in their efforts to save time and beat the expiry date of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.

The enormous job of distributing over four million hectares of farmlands to some three million beneficiaries resulted in the extension of the program’s land distribution component for another 10 years and, again, for five years.

Agrarian Reform Secretary Conrado Estrella III said accelerating the subdivision of collective CLOAs into individual titles is the key to empowering farmer-beneficiaries as it enables each of them to direct their individual aspirations as new landowners.

“It will also help improve the farmer-beneficiaries› security of tenure and strengthen their property rights,” Estrella said.

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