National Resettlement and Rehabilitation Administration

Also known as: NARRA — the statutory abbreviation of Republic Act No. 1160 · The resettlement administration of 1954 — the shorthand used in land-reform histories · Successor of LASEDECO — the lineage styling · The Magsaysay resettlement agency — the presidency-era styling · The agency whose acronym names a Palawan town — the toponymic styling

Government

Definition

The National Resettlement and Rehabilitation Administration (NARRA) was the Philippine resettlement agency created by Republic Act No. 1160, approved June 18, 1954 — the statute that abolished the Land Settlement and Development Corporation (LASEDECO) and stood up in its place an administration “to help speed up the free distribution of agricultural lands of the public domain to landless tenants and farm workers,” encouraging migration into sparsely populated regions, operating under presidential supervision through the Office of Economic Coordinator. (LawPhil — RA 1160) The Act was the third step of the settlement-agency lineage this wiki’s National Land Settlement Administration entry documents: the NLSA of Commonwealth Act No. 441 (1939) was dissolved by President Elpidio Quirino’s Executive Order No. 355 of October 23, 1950 — which dissolved the NLSA, the Rice and Corn Production Administration, and a department of the National Development Company into the new LASEDECO — and RA 1160 then abolished LASEDECO, routing its obligations to the Philippine Treasury and its assets to a Board of Liquidators for public auction, with the net proceeds passed to ACCFA for settler loans. (LawPhil — EO 355, LawPhil — RA 1160)

NARRA was the land arm of President Ramon Magsaysay’s program against the Huk rebellion: Magsaysay “worked for the establishment” of the agency to “amplify and stabilize” the Economic Development Corps (EDCOR), the military-run resettlement program for surrendered Huks, and NARRA “took over from the EDCOR,” helping give some sixty-five thousand acres to about three thousand indigent families and allocating another twenty-five thousand acres to some fifteen hundred landless families, with the 1954 statute aimed particularly at rebel returnees through home lots and farmlands in Palawan and Mindanao. (Wikipedia — Ramon Magsaysay, Wikipedia — Land reform in the Philippines) The agency’s own life ran nine years: the Agricultural Land Reform Code, Republic Act No. 3844, approved August 8, 1963, declared in Section 73 that “The National Resettlement and Rehabilitation Administration and the Land Tenure administration are hereby abolished,” transferring their powers, appropriations, equipment, records, and agricultural lands to the new Land Authority. (LawPhil — RA 3844) Historical register: defunct.

Identities

Source Type	Identity
Wikipedia	N/A — no standalone article; the agency is documented within the Ramon Magsaysay, Land reform in the Philippines, Banisilan, and Narra (Palawan) articles
Wikidata	N/A — no entity matching “National Resettlement and Rehabilitation Administration” (search verified)
DBpedia	N/A (DBpedia unreachable this session)
ProductOntology	N/A
Wiktionary	N/A
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)	N/A (LOC authorities unreachable this session)
MeSH	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A
Google Scholar	National Resettlement and Rehabilitation Administration NARRA RA 1160 June 18 1954 Magsaysay EDCOR LASEDECO EO 355 rebel returnees Palawan Mindanao Banisilan Proclamation 317 RA 3844 1963 Land Authority abolition
ConceptNet	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A

Also Known As

NARRA — the statutory abbreviation of Republic Act No. 1160
The resettlement administration of 1954 — the shorthand used in land-reform histories
Successor of LASEDECO — the lineage styling
The Magsaysay resettlement agency — the presidency-era styling
The agency whose acronym names a Palawan town — the toponymic styling

Examples and Analogies

A homestead pipeline with a screen at the door: the statute ordered at least three divisions — Settler Selection and Screening; Transportation and Supplies; and Settlement Assistance and Community Work — and told the screeners whom to prefer: tenants, “surrendered dissidents,” agriculture graduates, military trainees, and veterans, so that the land went first to the landless and the lay-down-their-arms. (LawPhil — RA 1160)
The EDCOR’s civilian heir: where the army had settled surrendered Huks on EDCOR land, NARRA took the function over — counterinsurgency by land title rather than by garrison, the conversion documented in the Magsaysay record. (Wikipedia — Ramon Magsaysay, Wikipedia — Land reform in the Philippines)
A genealogy in four names: NLSA (1939) dissolved into LASEDECO (1950) abolished into NARRA (1954) abolished into the Land Authority (1963) — each transfer carrying stock, staff, and mandate one roof forward. (LawPhil — EO 355, LawPhil — RA 1160, LawPhil — RA 3844)
Verified statutory and project data:
Creating statute: RA No. 1160, approved June 18, 1954 — abolished LASEDECO; NARRA under presidential supervision through the Office of Economic Coordinator (LawPhil — RA 1160)
Board: a chairman and five members appointed by the President with Commission on Appointments consent, three-year terms; General Manager at ₱12,000 per annum, Assistant General Manager at ₱9,000 (LawPhil — RA 1160)
Powers: assumed the Bureau of Lands’ duties under CA 691; distributes public agricultural land to qualified landless citizens; acquires landed estates on presidential direction; reclaims swamps and marshes; surveys and subdivides land for farms, townsites, and civic uses; assists settlers with transport, supplies, housing, and community organization (LawPhil — RA 1160)
Funding: ₱5 million for FY 1954–1955 as the “Revolving Fund of the Colonists,” then at least ₱8 million annually for ten years; ACCFA provided settler loans (LawPhil — RA 1160)
Land administration: custodian and administrator of public lands reserved for settlement, including former LASEDECO reservations, titled to settlers by patent under the Public Land Act; voluntary settlers and homestead applicants may not be obstructed (LawPhil — RA 1160)
Banisilan project: President Magsaysay’s Proclamation No. 317 of July 17, 1956 reserved 100,018 hectares in then-Cotabato for a NARRA resettlement project; the first settlers — sakada farm workers from Panay under Jesus T. Alisasis — arrived March 19, 1959 (Wikipedia — Banisilan)
Palawan project: the settlement program at what is now Narra municipality, “established on June 18, 1954,” resettled landless people from Luzon to Palawan; the municipality itself was created June 21, 1969 by RA No. 5642 (Wikipedia — Narra, Palawan)
Abolition: RA No. 3844, approved August 8, 1963, Section 73 — NARRA and the Land Tenure Administration abolished into the Land Authority; Section 96 routed NARRA’s claims and receivables to the Land Bank after evaluation (LawPhil — RA 3844)

Usage Scenarios

1. Studying the Magsaysay Resettlement Drive

NARRA is the institutional centerpiece of the 1950s resettlement offensive: RA 1160 abolished LASEDECO to build a dedicated agency for the quick, free distribution of public land to the landless, aimed at rebel returnees in Palawan and Mindanao — the civilian successor to the army’s EDCOR and the instrument of the acreage totals (65,000 acres to 3,000 families; 25,000 more acres to 1,500 families) carried in the land-reform record. (Wikipedia — Ramon Magsaysay, Wikipedia — Land reform in the Philippines)

2. Tracing the Settlement-Agency Lineage

Researchers fix the sequence through the statutes: CA 441 (1939) created the NLSA of Paulino Santos; EO 355 (October 23, 1950) dissolved the NLSA into LASEDECO; RA 1160 (June 18, 1954) abolished LASEDECO creating NARRA; RA 3844 (August 8, 1963) abolished NARRA creating the Land Authority — the four-corporation chain this wiki’s National Land Settlement Administration entry begins. (LawPhil — EO 355, LawPhil — RA 1160, LawPhil — RA 3844)

3. Documenting NARRA Projects on the Ground

Local histories use the agency’s proclamations as founding charters: Banisilan in Cotabato dates itself to Proclamation No. 317 of July 17, 1956 and the sakada landing of March 19, 1959, while Narra in Palawan grew from the June 1954 resettlement of landless families from Luzon — two documented instances of the town-making the statute contemplated. (Wikipedia — Banisilan, Wikipedia — Narra, Palawan)

4. Distinguishing the Agency from the Palawan Municipality

The municipality of Narra in Palawan — treated in this wiki’s separate entry on that town — takes its name from both the narra tree and the agency’s acronym; citations of “Narra” must therefore always say which entity is meant, the tree-named town or the settlement administration of RA 1160. (Wikipedia — Narra, Palawan)

5. Researching Agrarian-Reform Institutional History

NARRA’s abolition into the Land Authority by RA 3844 placed the resettlement function inside the lineage that became, under the 1971 Code of Agrarian Reform, the Department of Agrarian Reform — the institutional ancestry agrarian-reform historians reconstruct from these transfers. (LawPhil — RA 3844, Wikipedia — Land reform in the Philippines)

Strategies

Civilianize the counterinsurgency settlement: by taking over from EDCOR, NARRA moved Huk-returnee resettlement from army administration to a civil agency with a settler-screening division — pacification recast as land reform. (Wikipedia — Ramon Magsaysay, Wikipedia — Land reform in the Philippines)
Screen and prioritize: the statute’s preference ranking — tenants, surrendered dissidents, agriculture graduates, military trainees, veterans — aimed the program at the landless and the reintegrated rather than at speculators. (LawPhil — RA 1160)
Target the frontier provinces: Palawan and Mindanao were the named destinations, extending the Commonwealth’s Koronadal pattern of organized, state-directed colonization into the postwar era. (Wikipedia — Land reform in the Philippines)
Fund through a revolving fund and farm credit: the Colonists’ Revolving Fund plus ACCFA loans tied settlement to repayment discipline rather than pure subsidy. (LawPhil — RA 1160)
Dissolve forward with personnel settled: RA 1160 retired or paid off LASEDECO’s separated personnel while auctioning its assets — the wind-up template its own 1963 abolition would echo. (LawPhil — RA 1160, LawPhil — RA 3844)

Security and Safety Measures

Resettlement as security policy: settling surrendered dissidents on their own farms was the program’s core security logic — giving the rebel returnee “home lots and farmlands in Palawan and Mindanao” as the alternative to the hills. (Wikipedia — Ramon Magsaysay, Wikipedia — Land reform in the Philippines)
Tenure protection: patents under the Public Land Act carried the security of title to the settler family, while the statute barred obstruction of voluntary settlers and homestead applicants already on the land. (LawPhil — RA 1160)
Anti-corruption penal code: NARRA officers and employees who acquired land within its settlement projects faced removal, one to five years’ imprisonment, and ₱1,000 to ₱5,000 fines, and financial interest in agency contracts was likewise penalized (Section 18) — the insider-dealing guard the statute wrote for itself. (LawPhil — RA 1160)
Orderly wind-up at abolition: RA 3844’s transfer of NARRA’s appropriations, equipment, records, and lands to the Land Authority — with claims and receivables evaluated and routed to the Land Bank — protected the settler accounts from disappearing with the agency. (LawPhil — RA 3844)
For researchers: NARRA has no standalone reference article and no linked-data identity; claims must be cited to its creating and abolishing statutes and to the locality records of its projects, each dated to its regime. (LawPhil — RA 1160, Wikipedia — Banisilan)

Historical Context

The settlement agency of 1954 was the heir of two programs. The first was the Commonwealth’s: Paulino Santos’s NLSA had planted the Koronadal Valley colonies of 1939 — the history this wiki’s Paulino Santos entry carries — until EO 355 of October 23, 1950 dissolved the NLSA, together with the Rice and Corn Production Administration and the Machinery and Equipment Department of the National Development Company, into LASEDECO, a twenty-five-year public corporation headquartered in Manila. (LawPhil — EO 355) The second was military: Magsaysay’s EDCOR had settled surrendered Huks as part of the anti-insurgency campaign of the early 1950s. (Wikipedia — Ramon Magsaysay)

RA 1160 fused the lineages: the new National Resettlement and Rehabilitation Administration took over from EDCOR, absorbed the settlement functions LASEDECO had inherited from the NLSA, and spent the 1950s distributing land in Palawan and Mindanao — the Narra settlement in Palawan dating itself to the statute’s very date of June 18, 1954, and Banisilan’s 100,018-hectare Cotabato project following on Proclamation No. 317 of July 17, 1956. (Wikipedia — Narra, Palawan, Wikipedia — Banisilan) The agency’s end came not in the martial-law reorganizations but in the reform legislation of the Macapagal era: RA 3844, the Agricultural Land Reform Code approved August 8, 1963, abolished NARRA and the Land Tenure Administration into the Land Authority, the agency the 1971 Code of Agrarian Reform in turn replaced with the Department of Agrarian Reform. The town of Narra — created a municipality in 1969 — keeps the acronym in daily use; Banisilan’s record still notes that its founding project was administered by “NARRA (now the Department of Agrarian Reform),” the administrative chain in a parenthesis. (LawPhil — RA 3844, Wikipedia — Land reform in the Philippines, Wikipedia — Narra, Palawan, Wikipedia — Banisilan)

Challenges and Controversies

Abolished in 1963, Not the 1970s

Popular memory folds NARRA into the martial-law reorganizations of the 1970s; the statutory record is categorical that the agency was abolished by RA 3844 on August 8, 1963 — its Section 73 naming the National Resettlement and Rehabilitation Administration for extinction and its lands and functions passing to the Land Authority years before the DAR era began. (LawPhil — RA 3844)

The Name Collision with the Palawan Municipality

The municipality of Narra, Palawan spells its name as both the national tree and the agency’s acronym, and its own record dates its founding settlement program to June 18, 1954 — the date of RA 1160 itself. The overlap makes “Narra” a three-way ambiguity (tree, town, agency) that any citation must disambiguate. (Wikipedia — Narra, Palawan)

Resettlement and Its Discontents

The agency’s projects — like the NLSA’s before them — created settler communities on lands lived in by indigenous peoples; Banisilan’s own history records settler majorities from Panay and Luzon living alongside Manobo and Iranun communities, with the attendant questions about ancestral domain that the Mindanao resettlement drive’s legacy still carries. (Wikipedia — Banisilan)

An Agency Without an Article

NARRA is documented almost entirely through its bookends — the statute that created it and the Code that abolished it — plus the founding proclamations of its projects. Its administrators, its annual volumes, and its decade of operations between 1954 and 1963 remain to be reconstructed from primary records; this entry reports what the verified sources carry. (LawPhil — RA 1160, LawPhil — RA 3844)