Executive Order No. 355

Also known as: EO 355 · EO No. 355, s. 1950 — the dated series styling · The LASEDECO order — the functional shorthand · The Quirino reorganization order of October 23, 1950 · The order dissolving the NLSA — the lineage bookend styling

Government

Definition

Executive Order No. 355 is the reorganization order signed at Manila on October 23, 1950, by President Elpidio Quirino — through Executive Secretary Teodoro Evangelista and pursuant to Republic Act No. 422 — officially titled “Creating the Land Settlement and Development Corporation and Dissolving the National Land Settlement Administration, and the Rice and Corn Production Administration and the Machinery and Equipment Department of the National Development Company.” (LawPhil — EO 355) In a single instrument the order chartered the Land Settlement and Development Corporation (LASEDECO), a public corporation to exist for twenty-five years with its main office in Manila, and dissolved three bodies into it: the National Land Settlement Administration (NLSA) of Commonwealth Act No. 441, the Rice and Corn Production Administration, and the Machinery and Equipment Department of the National Development Company. (LawPhil — EO 355)

The order is the hinge of the Philippine settlement-agency lineage this wiki’s National Land Settlement Administration entry documents — NLSA (1939) dissolved into LASEDECO (1950) abolished into NARRA (1954) by Republic Act No. 1160, whose own Section 10 recites LASEDECO’s creation by “Executive Order No. 355, dated October 23, 1950.” (LawPhil — RA 1160) Legal and historical register: the order itself was spent by the 1954 abolition of the corporation it created, but it remains the governing text for how one public corporation was assembled out of three dissolved bodies.

Identities

Source Type	Identity
Wikipedia	N/A — no standalone article; the order is documented within locality and land-reform articles through the LASEDECO and NLSA records
Wikidata	N/A — the only “Executive Order 355” item (Q19107022) is a United States order; no Philippine item (search verified)
DBpedia	N/A
ProductOntology	N/A
Wiktionary	N/A
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)	N/A
MeSH	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A
Google Scholar	Executive Order No. 355 October 23 1950 Quirino LASEDECO Land Settlement and Development Corporation National Land Settlement Administration Rice and Corn Production Administration National Development Company Republic Act 422 reorganization RA 1160 NARRA
ConceptNet	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A

Also Known As

EO 355
EO No. 355, s. 1950 — the dated series styling
The LASEDECO order — the functional shorthand
The Quirino reorganization order of October 23, 1950
The order dissolving the NLSA — the lineage bookend styling

Examples and Analogies

One order, three funerals and a birth: the title carries the whole instrument — three bodies dissolved (the NLSA, the Rice and Corn Production Administration, the NDC’s Machinery and Equipment Department), one corporation born — reorganization by consolidation rather than by creation from nothing. (LawPhil — EO 355)
A corporate merger deed issued as an executive order: Section 13 reads like a merger instrument — “personnel, records, properties, equipment, assets, rights, choses in action, obligations, liabilities, and contracts” transferred and assumed, with the Auditor General to inventory and value the estate — the corporate form imposed on a reorganization of government. (LawPhil — EO 355)
A sixtieth-day cliff for the staff: transferred personnel had to be reappointed within sixty days or be deemed separated — the human mechanics of dissolution, written into the order itself. (LawPhil — EO 355)
Verified statutory data:
Issuance: October 23, 1950, Manila, by President Elpidio Quirino, signed by Executive Secretary Teodoro Evangelista, pursuant to Republic Act No. 422; effectivity October 23, 1950 (LawPhil — EO 355)
Creation (Sec. 1): LASEDECO, public corporation, twenty-five years, main office in Manila (LawPhil — EO 355)
Purposes (Sec. 2): land acquisition, settlement, cultivation; farm ownership for tenants, small farmers, agriculture graduates, military trainees, veterans, and guerrilla members; migration to sparsely populated regions; subdivision into farms, townsites, roads, parks; credit agencies, utilities, irrigation, cooperatives, tractor and machinery pools; ten-year transfer lock on disposed lots (LawPhil — EO 355)
Capital (Sec. 3): net worth of the dissolved bodies, appraised value of ceded lands, and future appropriations; the Republic not liable for the corporation’s debts (LawPhil — EO 355)
Governance (Secs. 4–6): chairman and six members appointed with Commission on Appointments consent, staggered terms, ₱25 per diem; General Manager appointed by the Board with presidential approval (LawPhil — EO 355)
Dissolution (Sec. 12): NLSA, Rice and Corn Production Administration, and NDC Machinery and Equipment Department dissolved; references in law to them henceforth mean LASEDECO for the functions assumed (LawPhil — EO 355)
Transfer (Sec. 13): wholesale transfer and assumption, Auditor General inventory, sixty-day reappointment rule, and continuation of the Rice and Corn Production Administration’s agricultural activities only in cultivated areas for not more than five years (LawPhil — EO 355)
Land cession (Sec. 14): surveyed public agricultural lands previously reserved to the NLSA and the Rice and Corn Production Administration ceded to LASEDECO, title by presidential patent or deed (LawPhil — EO 355)
Statutory recital: RA 1160 (June 18, 1954), Section 10, identifies the corporation as created by “Executive Order No. 355, dated October 23, 1950” and abolishes it (LawPhil — RA 1160)

Usage Scenarios

1. Studying the Settlement-Agency Lineage

Researchers use the order as the lineage’s middle anchor: it dissolved the NLSA chartered by Commonwealth Act No. 441 on June 3, 1939 and created the corporation that RA 1160 would abolish on June 18, 1954 — each transfer carrying stock, staff, and mandate one roof forward. (LawPhil — CA 441, LawPhil — RA 1160)

2. Analyzing Reorganization by Executive Order

EO 355 is a primary text of the delegation-based reorganization presidency: issued under Republic Act No. 422’s authority, it abolished statutory agencies and conveyed their lands and obligations by order rather than by act of Congress — the mode of reorganization the postwar settlement program repeatedly used. (LawPhil — EO 355)

3. Tracing Land Disposition Mechanics

The order’s Section 14 route — surveyed public agricultural lands reserved to the dissolved agencies ceded to the new corporation, title conveyed by presidential patent or deed — is the documented mechanism by which the NLSA’s reservation estates passed to LASEDECO and on, after 1954, into NARRA’s custodianship. (LawPhil — EO 355, LawPhil — RA 1160)

4. Verifying Agency Attributions

Because the order fixes the NLSA’s dissolution date, it is the corrective instrument for anachronism: any settlement work dated after October 23, 1950 belongs to LASEDECO (and, after June 18, 1954, to NARRA), not to the NLSA. (LawPhil — EO 355, LawPhil — RA 1160)

Strategies

Write the successor into the old law: Section 12’s rule that references to the dissolved bodies henceforth mean LASEDECO kept every prior statute and order operative without amendment — continuity by interpretive clause. (LawPhil — EO 355)
Sunset the merged functions: the five-year, cultivated-areas-only limit on continuing the Rice and Corn Production Administration’s activities shows the drafters ring-fencing what the new corporation was not — a grains agency — from what it was, a settlement corporation. (LawPhil — EO 355)
Guard the corporation against its own officers: the bar on officers and employees acquiring land within the corporation’s jurisdiction was written at creation, the anti-corruption design the 1954 NARRA statute would repeat with criminal penalties. (LawPhil — EO 355, LawPhil — RA 1160)
Abolish by statute when the order-made corporation fails: RA 1160’s detailed wind-up — liquidators, auctions, separation pay — is the legislative template for ending what an executive order had begun. (LawPhil — RA 1160)

Security and Safety Measures

Delegated power, stated on its face: the order recites its statutory authority (Republic Act No. 422) — the formal safeguard of reorganization orders, tying the dissolution of statutory agencies to a congressional delegation. (LawPhil — EO 355)
Audit continuity: the Auditor General’s representative audited the new corporation under commercial-audit principles and reported annually — the fiscal control carried across the dissolution line. (LawPhil — EO 355)
Merit and civil-service coverage: appointments were merit-based, with Civil Service coverage except for policy-determining, confidential, and technical positions — the personnel protections attached to the reorganized establishment. (LawPhil — EO 355)
Settler tenure protected across the transfer: the ten-year transfer lock on disposed farm lots survived the reorganization, and the lands reserved for settlement moved intact to the successor corporation — the continuity that protected settler expectations from the agencies’ extinction. (LawPhil — EO 355)
For researchers: the order exists as a primary text on LawPhil; the Official Gazette’s copy was not retrievable this session, so quotations should be cited to the LawPhil text with section numbers, and the order’s relation to the later-named Rice and Corn Administration (created 1962) kept distinct from the Rice and Corn Production Administration it actually dissolved. (LawPhil — EO 355, LawPhil — RA 3452)

Historical Context

The order belongs to the Quirino administration’s postwar reconstruction of the settlement state. The Commonwealth had built the NLSA in 1939 — the five-member board corporation capitalized at twenty million pesos from coconut-oil excise proceeds that planted the Koronadal Valley colonies — but the agency that emerged from war and occupation no longer fit the land problems of 1950: tenancy in the settled regions and the open frontier of Mindanao. Acting under the reorganization delegation of Republic Act No. 422, President Quirino signed EO 355 on October 23, 1950, dissolving the NLSA, the Rice and Corn Production Administration, and the NDC’s Machinery and Equipment Department into a new corporation built for development — credit, utilities, irrigation, cooperatives, machinery pools — as well as settlement. (LawPhil — EO 355, LawPhil — CA 441)

The corporation the order created went to work on its predecessor’s reservations — the Kalawag settlement opened by the LASEDECO Board in 1951 on former NLSA land at Isulan, among the documented projects — but its charter life was cut short by statute: RA 1160, approved June 18, 1954, abolished LASEDECO and created NARRA in its place, reciting EO 355 by number and date in Section 10. (Wikipedia — Isulan, LawPhil — RA 1160) The order thus stands in the record exactly as its title says — the instrument of a creation and three dissolutions — the middle document of the lineage that runs from Commonwealth Act No. 441 through to the Land Authority of the 1963 Agricultural Land Reform Code. (LawPhil — CA 441, LawPhil — RA 1160)

Challenges and Controversies

The Grains-Agency Confusion

The order is sometimes said to have abolished the “Rice and Corn Administration” — an anachronism: that agency was created by Republic Act No. 3452 in 1962, twelve years after EO 355. The body the order actually dissolved was the Rice and Corn Production Administration, together with the NDC’s Machinery and Equipment Department — a distinction this wiki’s Rice and Corn Administration entry preserves for the grains-agency lineage. (LawPhil — EO 355, LawPhil — RA 3452 note)

A Statutory Agency Ended by Order

EO 355’s mode of action — an executive order dissolving agencies created by statute — was the standing question of the delegation era: Congress had chartered the NLSA in 1939, and in 1950 the President dissolved it under a general reorganization authority (Republic Act No. 422) rather than by amending act — the order’s own recitals carrying the authority on which the whole consolidation rested. (LawPhil — EO 355, LawPhil — CA 441)

The Corporation That Did Not Outlive Its Charter

LASEDECO was chartered for twenty-five years and abolished in under four — the judgment, written into RA 1160, that a development corporation was the wrong vehicle for free land distribution. The order’s ambitious Section 2 purposes thus read today as the program description of a corporation given no time to execute them, the discontinuity this wiki’s Land Settlement and Development Corporation entry documents. (LawPhil — EO 355, LawPhil — RA 1160)

A Primary Text Without a Secondary Literature

The order is documented through its own text and its statutory neighbors — no standalone reference article, no linked-data identity, and no retrievable Official Gazette copy this session. Its administration history — who sat on the first Board, how the sixty-day reappointments went — remains to be reconstructed from primary records; this entry reports what the verified sources carry. (LawPhil — EO 355)