Farming rights advocacy groups yesterday came out in support of the nation’s farmers as they face increasing land expropriation, with two groups also announcing plans for an overnight protest next week.
“The past decade has seen tens of thousands of good farms taken over [for development projects], and farmlands continue to disappear,” alliance president Liu Ching-chang (劉慶昌) told a news conference in Taipei. “I wonder if our children and grandchildren would simply stop eating rice.”
Liu is a farmer from Erchongpu (二重埔) in Jhudong Township (竹東), Hsinchu County, whose farmland is also facing expropriation as the government moves to expand Hsinchu Science Park.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
Liu said that government officials — including President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) and Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) —had promised farmers last year to revise the Land Expropriation Act (土地徵收條例), but “expropriation has continued everywhere.”
“If the government is sincere about its promise, it should halt all ongoing expropriations until the law is amended,” Liu said.
Liu and other farmers’ rights advocates are not alone in their plea for a halt to forcible land takeover, as individuals and organizations from various countries voiced their support either by showing up in person at the news conference or by signing a petition.
Alex Kawakami, a spokesman for Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (Landless Farmers’ Movement, MST) who was present at the press conference, said that a global drive to develop biofuel has led to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest’s ecological diversity and regular farming activity as large tracts of land were cleared for corn, soybean or sugarcane plantation.
“As a result, farmers are making less making less money, the unemployment rate has gone up, and [farmers’] lives have been greatly affected,” Kawakami said.
Aside from the MST, several other organizations or individuals, including Vandana Shiva from India’s Navdanya Foundation, Focus on Global South and the Grain, had signed a petition to show their support for farmers in Taiwan.
The Farming Villages Defense Alliance and the Taiwan Rural Front also announced that more than 1,000 farmers from 12 farming communities facing forced land expropriation would stage an overnight rally to voice their discontent on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office in Taipei starting on the evening of July 16.
In related news, controversy over the government’s public grain procurement policy came under spotlight this week when an elderly farmer in Chiayi County allegedly committed suicide because of anxiety about lower prices and the blight that struck his paddy field this year.
Visiting the farmer’s family on Tuesday, Chiayi County Commissioner Chang Hwa-kuan (張花冠) criticized the government’s food policy, saying that the timing was bad, that it lacked supporting measures and that it had failed to benefit farmers.
Since the government raised grain procurement prices by NT$3 per kilogram in April — when farmers had already run out of stock — grain merchants, rather than farmers, have been the beneficiaries of the policy, Chang said.
An abundant harvest during the year’s first harvest season prompted some grain merchants to lower procurement prices, forcing farmers to sell their produce cheaply, she said.
Chen Jun-yan (陳俊言), section director of the southern region branch of the Agriculture and Food Agency, has said that the lower-than-expected procurement price was a result of the increased harvest, which rose by 10 to 20 percent this year.
This year’s first harvest was also completed in a very short time, which has not happened in 20 years, Chen added.
‘NO SECURITY RISK’: The Railway Bureau reassured the public that the technicians’ activities were limited to technical guidance and did not involve sensitive systems The Railway Bureau yesterday said it had invited eight Chinese technicians to assist with an airport MRT construction project. The bureau issued the confirmation after an Internet user said Chinese nationals had entered the construction zone of Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport’s Terminal 3 project. They asked why “individuals from an enemy state” were allowed access to such a major national infrastructure project, which raised serious concerns over Taiwan’s industrial safety, sensitive systems and information security. The bureau’s Northern Region Engineering Branch Office said subcontractor Taiwan Handle Industrial Co (台灣手把工業) of the Taoyuan airport MRT’s “Contract No. CU05 Project A14 Station Civil, MEP &
The National Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology yesterday showcased its locally developed variants of the Vision 60 robotic patrol dog, which it plans to deploy on the nation’s outlying territories in the South China Sea. The variants were produced under the Joint Lab project — created by the institute and domestic companies — and assembled with domestically produced motors, lenses and artificial intelligence (AI) systems alongside licensed tech from the US, Missile and Rocket Systems Research Division deputy director Jen Kuo-kang (任國光) told the media event at a military base in Taipei’s Dazhi (大直) area. Taiwan has built up its strengths
RIGHT DIRECTION: Taiwan’s efforts to prevent forced labor include a proposal to ‘fully prohibit’ employers from withholding workers’ documents, an official said Taiwan is to establish a mechanism to restrict imports of goods linked to forced labor, the Executive Yuan said yesterday, after the US proposed imposing additional tariffs on Taiwanese goods over labor concerns. “The Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Economic Affairs are to establish an interministerial review procedure,” Executive Yuan spokesperson Michelle Lee (李慧芝) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “The government is to use the Foreign Trade Act [貿易法] as the legal basis to restrict imports of goods produced with forced labor” and bring its supply chain governance more in line with international standards on human rights, resilience
NOT IMMEDIATE: Taiwan has a chance to appeal the proposed 10 percent tariff before it starts, while other countries face a 12.5 percent tariff from the trade office Taiwan is among 60 economies determined by the US to have failed to impose or enforce a ban on the importation of goods produced with forced labor, according to a notice released on Tuesday by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), which proposed imposing an additional 10 percent or more tariff on them. The USTR in a statement said that following an investigation, it had determined under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 that the failure of the 60 economies to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor is
RSS