It criticized the Philippine agrarian reform program in no uncertain terms. In their presentations, the two World Bank experts not only affirmed the criticisms on CARP raised by the World Bank Report on the Philippines in 1998 but brought their discourse to a general criticism of what they called expropriative or administrative land reform. Why can negotiated reform do better than the exproriative and administrative type, asks the World bank team. To all intents and purposes, the World Bank is proposing a new model for agrarian reform in the Philippines, which it alternately calls market-assisted or negotiated approach. Unlike in the three countries cited by the World Bank study, namely Colombia, Brazil and South Africa, where exist, according to the study, a land surplus and falling land prices, land market conditions in the Philippines are not encouraging to negotiated land transfers.
Land prices remain high and at times, at speculative levels.
The policy environment plus the slow implementation of CARP induce land conversions and land speculation. Extra-economic reasons like kinship, prestige and political power persist as powerful motivations for landowners to hold on to their lands. The current economic crunch discourages landowners from leaving their lands in favor of other business opportunities. Knowledge of the existence of a World Bank program to support land purchases may even contribute to a further increase in land prices. All the abovementioned factors encourage landowners to be stubborn in their demand for high land prices.