A recent legal amendment by the Ministry of the Interior stipulating that only farmers will be allowed to construct farmhouses has met strong opposition from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus.
The amendment to the Regulations Governing the Building of Agricultural Houses on Agricultural Land (農業用地興建農舍辦法) states that only farmers who have taken out farmers’ insurance or category 3 national health insurance, or who could prove their agricultural activity, would be allowed to construct farmhouses.
The amendment took immediate effect on Thursday.
Separately, the Executive Yuan on Thursday proposed a draft amendment to the Agricultural Development Act (農業發展條例) submitted by the Council of Agriculture (COA), stipulating that only farmers who have engaged in agricultural production for more than a year and do not own a farmhouse can purchase or inherit farmhouses.
The proposed amendment by the Executive Yuan requires the approval of the legislature. Until then, non-farmers would be able to buy or inherit farmhouses.
The amendments aim to curb price speculation on farmland and discourage construction of non-agricultural buildings on areas designated as agricultural land.
They are also meant to enforce the principle of “agricultural land solely for agricultural use,” but critics have said that moving the clauses that control farmhouse transactions from the regulations to the development act would only allow farmhouse speculation to continue indefinitely.
“The amended regulations offer nothing different from the existing practices and the Cabinet has only codified them and made them clearer,” COA Minister Chen Bao-ji (陳保基) said.
The buying and selling of farmhouses relates to citizens’ rights, the modification of which would draw heavy criticism if amendments were made to auxiliary regulations rather than the main law, so the council moved the clauses concerning the trading and transferring of farmhouses back to the Agricultural Development Act, Chen said.
The new regulations would only affect farmhouse speculators rather than farmers, which is the key to ensuring that agricultural land is used solely for agriculture, he said.
“The amendments seem to have a particular political party’s electoral prospects in mind. If the Cabinet bulldozes the regulations, I believe many district legislators would quit the KMT caucus’ negotiations with the Cabinet. The amendment is simply unreasonable,” KMT Legislator Chen Chao-ming (陳超明) said.
Farmers’ wealth would shrink because of the amendments, which were made by non-farmers without communicating with people who actually own agricultural land, he added.
Chen proposed that the amendments be debated and reviewed at the legislature and that the Cabinet stop enforcing the regulations until the Legislative Yuan gives the green light, adding that his proposal was backed by the KMT caucus.
KMT Legislator Liao Cheng-ching (廖正井) said that the solution to farmhouse speculation lies with the government rather than the imposition of more legal restrictions.
The council has misunderstood the nature of the issue and sacrificed the interests of all farmers, which is like the collective punishment doled out in the military, when a whole unit is disciplined because one soldier has made a mistake, he said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods