DATU SALIBU, Maguindanao, Philippines – One-hundred eighty-six more conflict-displaced farmers in Maguindanao received on Tuesday free rice and corn seeds under the present Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) government’s “early recovery program” that seeks to help former evacuees restart normal lives in better state-assisted fashion.

ARMM officials led by Regional Executive Secretary Naguib Sinarimbo distributed one sack of hybrid rice and corn seeds to each of the 186 farmers here who were displaced by the fighting between military and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) forces in 2008.

The recipients came from Barangay Pagatin of this town and the villages of Madia, Tee and Sambolawan in adjacent Datu Saudi Ampatuan municipality.

“The areas are four return sites of evacuees who left their homes at the height of conflict,” Sinarimbo told newsmen here.

Sinarimbo said the administration of Acting Regional Governor Ansaruddin Alonto-Adiong has facilitated the return of nearly 20,000 families from 11 evacuation sites in the province since he assumed office on December 14, 2009.

Currently, only some 1,500 families remain at the evacuation centers and are under persuasion by the Adiong administration to return to their points of origin or get resettled in places of their choice with full material and technical assistance from government and private institutions via the regional regime’s early recovery program (ERP).

Assisted both by the national government and some foreign donor-institutions, the ERP seeks to build 2,400 core shelters for the evacuees whose abodes were destroyed in the conflict, give them sources of livelihood, yield free seeds and fertilizers alongside farm machineries for farmer- evacuees, and help them set up marketing system for their produce.

“We try to see to it that the evacuees were given livelihood programs for them to start anew normal if not better lives,” Sinarimbo said.

Meanwhile, the Maguindanao health office also conducted Tuesday a medical mission in Datu Saudi Ampatuan town and served over 3,000 villagers.