Cordi execs want ancestral titles out from LTA policy

BAGUIO CITY – The Cordillera Regional Development Council requested the Land Registration Authority and the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples to waive the segregation requirement in the registration of certificates of ancestral land titles from the Joint Memorandum Circular No. 1, series of 2007.

The region’s policy-making body said indigenous concept of ownership generally provides that ancestral domains are the indigenous cultural communities or indigenous peoples’ private but community property which belongs to the generations and therefore cannot be sold, disposed or destroyed.

Sections 5,6 and 7 of Joint Memorandum Circular No. 1, series of 2007 which was issued by the LRA and NCIP requires the segregation or exclusion of titled properties overlapped by the certificates and ancestral domain titles and the correction of the ancestral domain survey map using the approved technical descriptions of the identified overlapped titled properties; and that thereafter, the original survey plan of the ancestral domain as corrected, shall again be submitted to LRA for final projection.

The RDC argued the entire segregation process involves several steps which are reportedly expensive, tedious and time-consuming, and will thereby unnecessarily and agonizingly prolong the entire registration process.

Section 11 of Republic Act 8371 or the Indigenous peoples Rights Act provides that the rights of indigenous cultural communities and indigenous peoples to their ancestral lands by virtue of native titles shall be recognized and respected by the State.

According to the RDC-CAR, the final result will be an ancestral domain map full of loopholes and a certificate of ancestral land title that would be about over one hundred pages thick which will not be friendly to the awardees or the land owner.

Records show that there is a final instruction from Presidential Management Staff chief Hermogenes Esperon where NCIP, LRA, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and Department of Agrarian Reform to facilitate and fastrack the delineation and registration of 11 certificates of ancestral land titles in Benguet for awarding, and for inclusion in the priority concerns of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Due to the intricate segregation process as illustrated and despite the hiring of five casual personnel for the said purpose, the NCIP-CAR, even with the cooperation of the DENR-CAR and DAR-CAR, could not expect to meet the deadline set by PMS in the awarding of the ancestral domain titles.

In illustrating the tedious process, the RDC-CAR bared the certificate of ancestral domain title of Kapangan town was approved by NCIP on November 14, 2005 and the survey plan was thereafter submitted to LRA for projection.

However, LRA returned the survey plan to NCIP after more than a year with around 15,000 titles issued within the Kapangan ancestral domain and it took four weeks and five personnel using auto cad to finish the plotting of the survey plans. -- Dexter A. See