Cordillera IRA and autonomy

>> Tuesday, July 19, 2016

EDITORIAL

It is ironic that as the region celebrates Cordillera Month, the regional Dept. of  Interior and Local Government said “Cordillera will always be at the losing end of the bureaucracy when national standards are implemented to the fullest because of its small population and land area that deprives the people of substantial development projects and better delivery of basic services.”
Engineer Marlo N. Iringan, DILG Cordillera regional director, said it is high time  Cordillerans face the reality that their local government always got the least allocation from the budget of national line agencies and share from the Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA) because of its small population and land area.
“We have to continue our efforts towards achieving autonomy because it is the only justifiable and legal means by which the region as a whole could demand from the national government the allocation of more resources for the overall development of the region considering that the Cordillera will be treated as a regular region in terms of the allocation of the government’s resources if it will remain as a special administrative region or opt to become a regular region,” Iringan told stakeholders during the kick off ceremony of the Unity Gong Relay in Baguio City last week to celebrate the occasion themed “Cordillera Administrative Region at 29: Working together for an autonomous and empowered Cordillera.”
                Under the law, the IRA is allocated to local governments using the formula 50 percent for population, 25 percent for land area and 25 percent for equal sharing.
The DILG-CAR official said the whole population of the region is more than 1.7 million and its land area is more than 1.85 million hectares compared to the population of Cavite which is more than 1.6 million and more than triple in terms of land area, thus, Cavite’s IRA is much bigger compared to the IRA of the local governments in the region combined.
The Cordillera Regional Development Council had admitted the region as a whole had been receiving the least budgetary allocation from the different national line agencies the past several years amidst persistence of congressmen and local officials to lobby for increased allocation to fund more development projects and improve services for the people.
Iringan urged Cordillerans to join the RDC and its partners to perk up support for stakeholders to the region’s renewed quest for regional autonomy even with federalism being strongly advocated by the Duterte administration.

He encouraged barangay and other local officials regionwide to include autonomy in the crafting of their short, medium and long-term development plans so that the region will give justice to the stalwarts of self-governance who risked their lives in the past to achieve autonomy, which was the creation of the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) by virtue of Executive Order No. 220 issued by former President Corazon C. Aquino on July 15, 1987. Quo vadiz Cordillera?

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