The Construction and Planning Agency is close to announcing a national land planning bill to replace the decades-old Regional Plan Act (區域計畫法), officials said.
The draft act would classify all land into five main categories: national conservation, marine resources, agricultural development, and urban and rural development zones, they said.
Each category would be governed by different regulations reflecting the purpose of the plots of land, making rezoning difficult, they said.
The bill mandates that land-use designations cannot be changed except during reviews that are conducted every 10 years nationally and every five years locally, they said.
The draft would bar all forms of land use that are not strictly related to farming in “type one” agricultural development zones, which refers to plots that are 25 hectares or larger with 80 percent or more of their areas being cultivated, they said.
An estimated 409,000 hectares of the nation’s 870,000 hectares of registered farmland would fall under a “type one” status, the officials said.
The draft stipulates four other uses of agricultural land for non-agricultural development, such as land use for religious, funerary or recreational purposes, they said.
The draft mandates that farmland near urban areas be defined as “type five” agricultural development zones, which can be developed for most non-agricultural purposes.
As much as 100,000 hectares of land could qualify as “type five” and the Ministry of the Interior has suggested that such zones be merged with rural and urban development zones, the Council of Agriculture said.
However, the council is withholding a decision on the proposal until it can adequately evaluate its effects, it said.
Of the 40,000 hectares of farmland that have been illegally developed, 13,000 hectares have been used as factory sites, the council said.
A substantial number of illegal factories have polluted the soil to a point where the land under and around them cannot be used for farming, Council of Agriculture Deputy Minister Chen Chi-chung (陳吉仲) said, adding that the draft would designate such land as industrial zones.
More than 30,000 hectares of farmland are occupied by nominal agricultural residences and the council is still discussing how to address the problem, he said.
The draft has a number of potential flaws, council and Ministry of the Interior officials have said.
While the draft is designed to concentrate farmland to achieve economies of scale, county and city governments are worried that it will negatively affect land-use flexibility in their jurisdictions, they said.
The proposal could result in an overall decrease in the amount of land under cultivation, they said.
Public hearings are scheduled for today and a public preview of the proposed legislation is scheduled for May next year, they 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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