THE United Nations predicted that by 2050 more than 65 percent of Filipinos (around 100 million) will live in urban areas. Such trend–barely 35 years away–opens up critical policy issues on land use and water management.
Land, like water, is finite. It’s vital to many economic activities such as food production. Recently, Hilal Elver, the UN special rapporteur on the Right to Food, visited the Philippines and announced in a preliminary report on widespread hunger and malnutrition, that massive land conversion was among the factors that adversely affected food production in the country.
I have written in previous
columns how poor water governance is posing a clear and present danger to our growth momentum. This is equally true, perhaps in an even more immediate degree, with respect to the lack of forward planning and haphazard land-use management. Food production is just one activity affected by poor land use.
Current land-use policies are found in different national laws, including the Local Government Code, as well as the Agricultural and Fisheries Modernization Act of 1997. Land disposition and distribution are entrusted to various agencies, including the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, the Department of Justice and the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples. The multiplicity of laws and regulations as well of the governing bodies, the lack of harmonization and coordination among them, reflect the chaotic state of land-use governance.
Such discord leads to the many substandard comprehensive land- use plans (CLUPs) that several local government units have formulated. A 2014 Philippine Institute for Development Studies report emphasizes that many CLUPS were slanted toward residential and commercial development, while plans for productivity-enhancing infrastructure and environmental conservation were minimal.
A 2012 Human Development Network study shows such plans were short of long-term vision and clear-cut strategies to achieve growth and sustain it. As a consequence, informal settlements–often built on precarious geohazard sites and protection zones (e.g. salvage areas of seas and rivers, or roads and rail set-asides)–have become major slum colonies in Metro Manila and in the rest of the country’s other big cities and towns, as well.
In 2013 President Aquino certified as urgent the National Land Use Act to create a unified framework for land resource management. Congress, however, has yet to pass such a measure to date. A land-use policy, alongside with water sector reforms, should be fast-tracked to ensure the sustainability of our country’s economic growth.
E-mail: angara.ed@gmail.com.
