No more than a year ago, the forests in Yanping Township (延平) in Taitung County were green and tranquil. Then backhoes and bulldozers began marching up the sides of pristine hills and mountains in rapid succession, knocking down trees to clear land for ginger farming.
An employee at the Yanping Township Office, who can see one of the mountain tops from his office, said that he sees the machines digging away every day, turning bamboo forests into land scarred yellow by its overturned soil.
“The plot of yellow soil was originally one acre [0.4 hectares], but now it is more than two acres,” he said.
Photo: CNA
A retired government worker surnamed Huang purchased a plot of land in the mountainous part of Yanping a few years ago. He installed an old shipping container there and lived a quiet life with his wife, doing his best not to damage the environment, the office staffer said.
Their only neighbors were birds, insects, muntjacs and wild rabbits until “the roaring backhoes came in” and destroyed the forests, Huang said.
Trees and animals gave way to fertilizer, pesticides and ginger farms, a wanton destruction of forests that is taking place not only in Yanping, but across the southeastern county.
Not surprisingly, it is being driven by short-sighted greed.
For farmers to harvest old ginger root on a hectare of land in the mountains, they only have to spend about NT$1.2 million (US$38,960) to prepare the soil, and grow and harvest the crop, but can earn NT$6 million, Yanping Township Office Secretary Hu Wu-jen (胡武仁) said.
“The risks are low and the profits are good. Of course ginger farmers are running up the mountains,” said Hu, who used to be a ginger farmer himself.
He said most farmers planting ginger in the mountains rent the land for a year from Aborigines, who might not have the money needed to prepare a plot.
So the Aborigines rent the land to ginger farmers and when they get the land back after a year, it has already been prepared for cultivation and use, Hu said, calling it a “win-win” situation.
The ginger farmers look for new pastures after a year because ginger roots “are picky when it comes to the soil,” needing virgin soil for the best results, a farmer surnamed Chang said.
However, while the farmers and Aborigines, the land’s “custodians,” benefit, the mountains and forests are damaged beyond repair.
A surge in price for aged ginger root is the financial incentive driving the farmers to the mountains.
A local vegetable vendor surnamed Chen said prices for aged ginger, which is harvested later than fresh ginger, skyrocketed to NT$200 per kilogram by the end of last year from no more than NT$30 per kilogram and was likely to remain high this year.
Chang said mountainous areas are ideal for growing aged ginger because they have not been cultivated before and the slopes are ideal for drainage.
He said many farmers have cooperated with Aborigines, who apply to the government to get land reserved for them and then rent it out.
Close to 100 such applications have been filed in Yanping Township alone in recent times.
The standard procedure involves Aborigines applying to township offices to cultivate a plot of land, then a reserved land rights review committee at the office examines the application and reports its decision for approval.
Under existing regulations, Aborigines can apply to cultivate a plot of land if it has been allocated by the government as Aboriginal farmland, pasture or land for breeding purposes.
However, they may not transfer or rent the land to others, unless the recipient is a family member, relative or heir.
For a breach of the regulations, the township office can withdraw their land and terminate the contract.
In addition, tree-felling plans have to be approved by forestry authorities and the trees must be sold through a public tender, according to regulations, which in Yanping are obviously not being followed.
When confronted over the issues, Taitung County Agriculture Department official Hsu Chien-te (許建德) said the department does not tolerate estrepement — the destructive waste of land — and that it conducts strict inspections of land reserved for Aborigines.
If land owners are not using the plots as they said they would, the county government demands that they improve within a certain amount of time or face fines from NT$60,000 to NT$300,000, Hsu said.
The county government has already issued 50 such fines, but the light penalties are clearly not achieving their purpose, as backhoes and bulldozers continue to dig away in the mountains, he said.
Since Chinese-language reports on the issue were published by the Central News Agency in the middle of this month, the Taitung District Prosecutors’ Office and Taitung police have stepped up investigations over the issue.
The police said they launched an investigation early this year and had finished inspecting seven plots in Yanping Township.
They said they would soon turn the cases over to prosecutors.
The police said they are also investigating more than 40 other allegedly illegal development cases in the mountains.
The prosecutors said they plan to hold a meeting with the police and other agencies to speed up investigations and set up a standard operating procedure for such cases.
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