Environmental groups on Thursday called for an overhaul of mining regulations to address shortcomings in mining oversight, saying the regulations allow most of the nation’s quarries to operate and extend their licenses indefinitely without undergoing reviews.
The call came after Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) Minister Lee Ying-yuan’s (李應元) announcement on Wednesday last week that mining is to be banned in national parks next year, with campaigners urging the government to review the restriction, because there is only one quarry inside a national park.
“There are 254 mining areas and 189 quarries in operation in Taiwan, and about 80 percent of the quarries have never undergone an environmental review, because they were licensed before 1995, when the Environmental Impact Assessment Act [環境影響評估法] was in place. In practice, those quarries can extend their licenses indefinitely without undergoing reviews due to legal loopholes,” Citizens of the Earth researcher Pan Cheng-cheng (潘正正) said.
Photo: Lu Yi-hsuan, Taipei Times
An imparity clause in the Mining Act (礦業法) stipulates that the government should approve an application for renewal of mining rights and it cannot dismiss renewal applications except in exceptional cases, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lin Shu-fen (林淑芬) said, adding that the clause requires the government to compensate miners for rejecting their applications.
“The government has tailored laws for the cement industry, so the industry enjoys special taxation measures and is able to renew mining rights indefinitely. The development of the cement industry is an example of the law being influenced by the powerful and the rich. Now it has to be stopped,” Lin said.
The Bureau of Mines has become a rubber-stamp agency to the extent that it has not rejected the renewal of a mining operation at a water conservation site in Nantou County, she said.
“Mining areas are mostly within traditional Aboriginal territories, but the designation of mining areas and approval of mining operation has excluded Aborigines’ participation, which is against the Indigenous Peoples Basic Act [原住民基本法]. While Aborigines are restricted from engaging in mineral collecting, which is part of their cultural practice, the laws are quite friendly to businesses,” New Power Party Legislator Kawlo Iyun Pacidal said.
Environmental groups have called for a comprehensive revision of mining laws for more than 30 years with little success, because limiting the cement industry, whose annual worth is more than NT$10 billion (US$306.7 million), involves the interests of many politicians, but laws that grant privileges to the highly polluting industry must be abolished, Treasure Our Land, Taiwan secretary-general Lin Tzu-lin (林子凌) said.
“The bureau understands the concerns of environmentalists and Aboriginal rights campaigners, and it will communicate with the EPA and the Council of Indigenous Peoples when revising the laws. However, from the bureau’s perspective, miners’ interests have to be protected, because they have invested large sums of money to set up mining operations, and it takes time for them to recover the cost,” Bureau of Mines Chief Secretary Hsu Ming-hung (徐銘宏) 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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