Win-win on land conversion?
Sometimes, overly rigid rules can even be counterproductive and yield reverse results. I’ve pointed this out before in the case of our land conversion rules, whose rigidity could well be their very downfall, and actually led to needless premature loss of thousands of hectares of prime agricultural land. I now believe that some out-of-the-box thinking, with a more realistic and pragmatic approach to land conversion could forestall large-scale losses of prime crop areas, and even expand irrigated farm areas at no cost to the government.
Consider the following: Our growing population and wider urbanization have come with rising migration out of our rural areas, not only into Metro Manila, Cebu, or Davao, but also into other secondary cities in our countryside. Growing urbanization is not unique to us, but as our population grows more rapidly than that of most of our peers, our urbanization also proceeds at a faster rate. In any case, there is no escape from the need to expand housing, commercial, and industrial (henceforth “HCI” for brevity) areas nationwide. Land developers everywhere know this.
But total land area is fixed, and the only land that could be used for such developments would either be agricultural lands, many of them prime irrigated areas, or uplands that are either primary or secondary forests. Developing the latter is highly restricted for good reason, especially now that we feel the results of deforestation through worsening floods in the lowlands, farms, towns, and cities alike. This leaves farmlands as the primary, if not the only, object for conversion into HCI uses. In short, conversion of farm areas into nonfarm uses is inevitable and unstoppable. Ban it, and people will find ways around it, by hook or by crook.
Meanwhile, our best irrigated farm lands are likely to be in areas most easily accessible to highways and densely populated areas, and less so in the hinterlands and more remote areas, even if soils there could be even more productive for agriculture. It has not helped that the government has perennially failed to provide adequate farm-to-market roads in these interior areas that could make them more accessible; the pun “farm-to-pocket roads” has been a painful constant reminder of why this is the case. In the absence of roads, irrigation facilities are also less likely to be found there. And so, when new HCI areas are needed, prime irrigated agricultural lands would be first to be targeted because they, too, are more within reach of population centers. For this reason, it’s unrealistic to expect a complete stop to the conversion of prime farm lands, even as our well-meaning rigid land conversion rules aim to do precisely this.
So how do the developers cope? They resort to “land banking,” acquiring thousands of hectares of farmland, much of it prime irrigated areas, for future conversion. Once they do, they cease any farm production on the property, abandon, and even destroy any irrigation facilities therein. A bank manager told me how sad it made him to personally witness a developer client do this deliberately. There’s a rational explanation for this, under our rigid land conversion rules: to convert it to HCI use, he must show the land to be unproductive. Hence, the banked land that typically gets developed up to 10 to 15 years later immediately—and prematurely— gets taken out of production. I saw this happen in a Laguna town, where my research team found hundreds of farmer tenants driven to poverty after losing their livelihoods when a large developer acquired hundreds of hectares of their erstwhile farm lands.
Now imagine if that big developer could keep leasing those farm lands to the same farmers—no livelihoods lost, and the developer earns rent from otherwise idle land—a win-win outcome! But this could only happen if he is allowed to convert that land to HCI use without restriction, once the demand is there, but with one tight condition: for each hectare of irrigated land he converts, he must irrigate or finance the irrigation of two (even three, four, or five) hectares of previously unirrigated land elsewhere. This could prove less costly than holding large tracts of idle and unproductive land for 10 to 15 years. If such a conversion were allowed with that condition, there may be little need for the massive land banking we see today, and productive farms could stay in production far longer than what is happening now.
The Department of Agriculture has just frozen applications for land reclassification for six months, aiming to allow it to reassess its regulatory framework, ensure policy consistency, and enhance oversight to protect agricultural lands from excessive conversion driven by urban development and infrastructure projects. Perhaps it can consider this out-of-the-box solution. We may find it to be the win-win solution we need to safeguard our food security.
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cielito.habito@gmail.com
