An Act Splitting the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Agrarian Reform (MAFAR) into Three (3) Agencies, Thereby Creating the Bangsamoro Ministry of Agriculture (B-MOA), the Bangsamoro Ministry of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (B-Mfar), and the Bangsamoro Agrarian Reform Office (Baro), Defining Their Powers and Functions, Amending Book I, Title I, Bangsamoro Autonomy Act No. 13 or the Bangsamoro Administrative Code, Appropriating Funds Thereof, and for Other Purposes

This breaks the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Agrarian Reform into three bodies and writes a charter for each: the Bangsamoro Ministry of Agriculture, the Bangsamoro Ministry of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, and the Bangsamoro Agrarian Reform Office. It does this by amending the Bangsamoro Administrative Code, Bangsamoro Autonomy Act No. 13.

The bill is built as five books. Book I sets the policy and performs the separation itself in a single section. Books II, III and IV are full organizational charters — mandate, powers and functions, organizational structure, the offices of the minister and deputy minister, a director general, bureaus and divisions, provincial offices, city and municipal offices, and the qualifications required of every one of those posts. Book V holds the miscellaneous provisions.

Each of the three gets its own field structure down to the municipality, its own authority over those field offices, its own arrangements for coordinating with attached agencies and with agriculture-related national agencies that were never devolved, and its own handling of nationally funded and foreign-assisted programs and of agricultural technicians deployed to local governments.

Book V settles the consequences. Affected officials and employees are compensated under existing law. Each of the three agencies gets a separate budget item in the annual appropriations act. The Office of the Chief Minister issues the implementing rules. A mandatory review falls due after 10 years, and Parliament is given a standing oversight function over the whole thing.

The explanatory note argues from the size of the sector. It cites the 2021 Gross Regional Domestic Product: BARMM is predominantly services-based at 38.9%, but agriculture, forestry and fishing follow immediately at 36.4%, ahead of industry at 24.7% — and the sector was accelerating, from 2.7% growth between 2019 and 2020 to 8.3% in the following period. It runs the constitutional argument alongside: Article XII on industrialisation founded on sound agricultural development and agrarian reform, the fisheries provision on small-scale utilization with priority to subsistence fisherfolk, and Article II Section 21 on comprehensive rural development.

The implicit case is that one ministry carrying agriculture, fisheries and agrarian reform together cannot give any of the three the attention a sector that size requires.

The asymmetry is the story. Two of the three come out of this as ministries, with a Minister, a Deputy Minister and a Director General; the third — agrarian reform — comes out as an Office headed by a Regional Director. A bill presented as separating three functions so each can be attended to properly in fact elevates two of them and leaves the third at a lower rank than the ministry it left. In a region where land tenure and ancestral domain are among the most contested questions there are, that is not a filing detail.

The title carries a naming wobble worth knowing about before anyone cites it. The title of the bill names the second body the Bangsamoro Ministry of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources; the operative section that performs the split calls it the "Bangsamoro-Ministry of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources Office" — a ministry and an office in the same breath.

And the money is missing in the place it matters most. This is a reorganization bill: its entire cost is transitional — new offices, new posts, new field structures in every province and municipality, and compensation for displaced staff. The bill mentions the compensation and then says the funding goes in the appropriations act in three separate line items. What the separation costs to carry out is the one number a reader would want and the bill does not have it.

On its progress: filed in October 2022, First Reading in January 2023, and then nothing on the index until November 2025, when it reached Second Reading and was referred to the Committees on Amendments, Revision and Codification of Laws and on Finance. Nearly 3 years between readings is on the long side even for this Parliament.