“In 1988, 86 percent of all Philippine landowners owned farms of 7 or fewer hectares, accounting for 23 percent of agricultural land, while less than 2 percent of landholders had farms exceeding 24 hectares, but controlled 36 percent of all farmland.”
[Source: Philippines: A Strategy to Fight Poverty, World Bank, November 13, 1995]

Regarding your other comment (at 7:22am), over here, the battle lines are more complex than you describe above. As Solita Monsod describes in her column, there are cases when the landlords and the NPA form an alliance to prevent land being turned over to the rightful beneficiaries:

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=18562

Monsod summarizes the obstacles to land reform as follows:

“…resistance from landowners, which take the form of legal(istic) as well as extra-legal resistance; resistance from the New People’s Army (NPA); some kind of government schizophrenia where agencies ignore/defy each other or take different sides, or are either afraid to uphold the law or too weak to uphold the law or themselves ignore the law.”

IMHO, it follows from the above example and obstacles that implementation of Land Reform is one of those programs that needs to be controlled from the Central (or at least Regional) Government as local governments are more easily controlled by the landlords & warlords.

Tony, if you care to go over the previous comments (particularly the one i made at Nov 29, 11:29pm and Nov 30, 2:52am as well as the comment by Abe N. Margallo at Nov 30, 12:20pm) , you will see that there is a distinction between Chavez and Mugabe. Chavez’ program has been compared to Abe Lincoln.

“1. Annual Poverty Indicators Survey (APIS) for 1998 as conducted by the National Statistics Office.
2. Data from the household survey of the CARP-Impact Assessment (CARP-IA) project being conducted by Dr. Gordoncillo’s team,
3. 1990 agricultural household survey conducted by Dr. Gordoncillo.”

Dr. Gordoncillo is with the Institute of Agrarian Studies (IAST) in UP Los Banos. From the UN’s FAO…”[the IAST] designed a monitoring and evaluation system that aims at keeping track of the progress of programme implementation while determining the effectiveness, impact and relevance of activities to their objectives” The following indicators were used:

- housing facilities and household assets;
- marketing and credit arrangements;
- employment;
- farm income, income inequity and farm expenditure;
- farm investment;
- ARBs’ perceptions of their socio-economic status.

According to Dr Hans Meliczek, Professor at the Institut für Rurale Entwicklung, Göttingen, Germany…”These indicators seem to be the most suitable for assessing the impact of CARP.” [Source: http://www.fao.org/docrep/X3720t/x3720t06.htm

As for reporting actual income, maybe the researchers in the field have better luck than us accountants.

As i mentioned in my previous comment (at 5:00pm above), the correlation that you are looking for is partially there in the form of inputs (such as irrigated land and access to credit) and the corresponding probability of being 'nonpoor'. What i disagreed with UPn Student's methodology is his ‘cost-benefit’ approach that attaches a dollar value to a human life. I'm not against assessing the relative costs of different land reform implementation strategies. If there is a cheaper more efficient way to implement genuine land reform, then by alls means, let's have it. In fact, the World Bank, in its 1996 Report 'Philippines: A Strategy to Fight Poverty' reached the following conclusion:

"The administrative complexity of land reform, the time consuming disputes that arise because of land valuation problems and the issues of exemptions for "efficient uses" of land probably cannot be resolved in the context of a government-sponsored and administered program being executed in a democratic society."

The World Bank then recommended an alternative 'market-assisted' land reform strategy which the Kilusan Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) labeled an 'obnoxious' land reform ideology. [Source: The World Bank's Market-Assisted Land Reform: Obstacle to Rural Justice, KMP, July 2000]

On the need for prioritization, i agree that this is necessary given the limited government but we have to recognize that land reform and education have different missions and one cannot be substituted for the other.

One thing that I looked into in the study when I sit in the panel for defense is the methodology, particularly what kind of data used ,whether they are primary or secondary data, the statistics applied and the scope and delimitations.
As to the data used, this study of Reyes made use of secondary data which do not specifically showed that household appliances were purchased from the savings not unless there was a follow-up questionnaire to the subject of the study which I deemed not possible since the data are for the ten-year period.

The scope and delimitations of the study stated that the benefits may have been received from previous program and not necessarily CARP alone.There is the answer. Even the incomes of the farmers have to be looked into if they were really from farming alone.

Besides, do they report the real income? As an accountant, I still have to find a farmer who reports the real income in his income tax.

It is not the outcome that I would like to see since the variables used by the researcher were the income as dependent variable and other sociodemographic factors as independent variables.

I want the changes in incomes of the Agrarian beneficiaries correlated with the costs of implementing the agrarian reform.

If the costs of agrarian reform bring about significant increase in the incomes of the farmers and if the incomes of the farmers were found to be indicators of poverty level of the farmers, then I can say that it is worth making it a priority.

This is exactly the argument of UPn, the justification of the agrarian reforms implementation with the assumption that it helps eradicate poverty in our agricultural sector.

Or the question of giving more budget to the education and other
economic sectors which benefits may not be statistically quantified.

Yes, sometimes when resources are limited there is a need for prioritizing.

“The mean land productivity of ARBs is P20,429.87 per hectare while mean land productivity of non-ARBs is P8,032.36 per hectare…The higher land productivity of ARBs could partly explain the observed lower poverty incidence among ARBs.”

That means that ARB beneficiaries are 2.5 times more efficient than their non-ARB counterparts.

Just to clarify, i haven’t encountered anyone in this thread (including me) who has argued against ‘infrastructure’. That part seems to be obvious at the outset. We are also in complete agreement as far as the need to establish property rights are concerned not the least because of the reasons stated in Hernando de Soto’s book. In fact, the key point about land reform (rural and urban) is to extend property rights to a greater part of the population.