The Nantou County Government on Saturday last week convened an environmental impact assessment meeting on plans to build an incinerator in Mingjian Township (名間).
In a particularly hard-to-watch moment, tea farmers knelt in protest alongside petitioners before a row of officials and police officers. The scene showed their feeling of betrayal and the depth of their anxieties over the proposal and the troubling reality that Nantou County has long been governed by the wealthy and powerful. Proper procedure has been reduced to a fig leaf for their vested interests.
The county government described the incinerator as necessary to deal with 250 tonnes of household garbage produced every day, yet the plans showed it would have a capacity of 700 tonnes. What of the extra 450 tonnes? It is simple: more room to process industrial waste for profit.
The county claims to be sorting out its finances, but it is actually pushing through a controversial and polluting treatment plant in Mingjian, where 60 percent of Taiwan’s Oolong tea for hand-shaken bubble tea drinks originates.
The county government proposed Sinmin Village (新民) as the site for the incinerator, but overlooked the dangers of the area’s basin-like terrain, which could potentially trap and accumulate dioxin pollutants. Once heavy metals enter the environment and the tea fields, it would put local tea farmers’ livelihoods and bubble tea food safety standards across the country at risk.
Interestingly, the original report considered Nantou City (南投), and Caotun (草屯), Jhushan (竹山) and Guosing (國姓) townships as sites for the incinerator, one of which was ruled out for being upwind of the Nantou County Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB) director’s house.
Ultimately, Mingjian Township, governed by a Democratic Progressive Party mayor, was selected. It is difficult not to view that decision as being politically motivated.
Perhaps most alarming is the lack of ethics behind the EPB’s decision.
The chairman of the Environmental Assessment Committee, National Chi Nan University professor Tsai Yung-pin (蔡勇斌), told the kneeling tea farmers: “You set a terrible example.”
Ivory tower arrogance indeed.
A quick look at the records reveals that Tsai’s team has long worked on Nantou County Government projects, where the relationship between research funding and policy decisionmaking has become deeply intertwined.
As the International Association for Impact Assessment puts it, environmental assessments should put public interests first.
What is happening in Nantou is unfair. EPB, as a player, is buying out the referee.
Why, in a democratic country, do citizens have no recourse other than kneeling? How could power in Nantou, long governed by the DPP, be flaunted so arrogantly? The issue is certainly not confined to the region either.
Once the inevitable “incinerator tea” label takes hold, the decades-long reputation of the purity of Mingjian’s tea would evaporate overnight.
Vested interests contaminating the bubble tea in every other person’s hand in Taiwan should concern all. Nantou County Commissioner Hsu Shu-hua (許淑華) must face the images of the kneeling protestors and ask herself: Is this not the very community she claims to be looking after?
Liou Je-wei is a teacher.
Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
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