Hundreds of farmers, developers and real estate agents yesterday staged a demonstration in pouring rain on Ketagalan Boulevard, protesting proposed restrictions on the building of houses on farmland.
The protest, mobilized by a construction firm, was organized in reaction to a draft regulation on constructing houses on farmland announced by the Council of Agriculture last week that stipulates that only professional farmers who make less than NT$500,000 (US$17,000) outside of agricultural activities and do not possess covered buildings are eligible to build houses on farmland.
Wu Sheng-lin (吳勝霖), head of the National Association for Rights on Farmlands, who is also the chief executive of Shiang Jing Construction, said the preconditions were too restrictive.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
“I don’t see why retired farmers cannot sell their farmland or build houses on their land to make some money,” Wu said. “The regulations, if they become official, will have a negative impact on the price of farmland and cause harm to those who have invested money [in farmland].”
He said that many retired farmers, who are mostly in their 70s or 80s, “could sell their land and live a good life,” but the new regulations would block that avenue.
“I bought a plot of farmland to build a house for my own use at the beginning of the year. It cost me more than NT$70 million,” Wu said. “Who’s going to compensate me for my loss if I cannot build the house?”
At a separate setting yesterday, Tsai Pei-hui (蔡培慧), spokeswoman for the Taiwan Rural Front, which is organizing an overnight rally to protest against the Land Expropriation Act (土地徵收條例) tonight, said yesterday’s protest was unrelated as the protesters’ demands were completely different.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the