The Yilan County Government on Tuesday said it would abolish a bylaw that limits the construction and trading of farmhouses to curb farmland speculation, while environmentalists criticized the move as politically motivated ahead of the Jan. 16 presidential and legislative elections.
Passed in April, the bylaw, which aims to stem speculation and uphold the principle of farmland being used solely for agriculture, stipulates that only farmers with more than two years of agricultural practice and farmers’ insurance are eligible to construct farmhouses.
The county said it decided to abolish the bylaw after the Council of Agriculture passed the Regulations Governing the Building of Agricultural Houses on Agricultural Land (農業用地興建農舍辦法) in September, which it said is in line with the bylaw and therefore should serve as a more authoritative version of it.
However, a group of protesters on Tuesday rallied in front of the county government building, criticizing what they said was a flip-flop on the issue.
Green Party-Social Democratic Party Alliance legislative candidate Wu Shao-wen (吳紹文) said the move was an apparent attempt to curry favor with investors and property brokers ahead of the elections.
“The county government should not abruptly revoke the bylaw until the controversy over the central government’s farmland regulations is put to rest,” Wu said.
Several legislators have threatened to stall the enforcement of the regulations by initiating a legislative review process.
The regulations are not as thorough as the bylaw in terms of the required distance between farmhouses and roads, the depth of earth filling in enclosing walls, as well as the design of the walls, Wu said.
The bylaw is an example of local governance and autonomy allowed by the council, which specified that local governments could draft bylaws according to their unique conditions, she said.
The Yilan Agriculture Department said the regulations are stricter than the bylaw, as they cap the floor area of farmhouses at 330m2, or at one-10th of the farmland on which the house is constructed, and that only farmers who could present one of seven specified documents could construct farmhouses.
The spirit of the regulations is in accordance with the bylaw, therefore to avoid legal confusion, the bylaw would be abolished as the regulations are in place, the department said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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