Farming activists are disappointed with a revision to the Land Expropriation Act (土地徵收條例) that the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) proposed that increases compensation to landowners and which would require government institutions to clarify the public interest involved in each land expropriation.
Following a series of large-scale protests against government takeovers of land to be used to build industrial parks and other industrial facilities, the MOI amended the Land Expropriation Act to compensate landowners according to the market value of their land while also requiring local governments to prove how the public would benefit from the development before a expropriation can take place.
Current law stipulates landowners be compensated according to the published value of the lands, which is often much lower than the market value.
The ministry’s amendments are to be sent to the Executive Yuan for -further review, before being sent to the Legislative Yuan to be finalized.
Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) on Thursday said he hopes that the amendments will pass in the next legislative session after a routine meeting within the ministry approved the amendments.
“They [the MOI] tried, but they did not touch the core of the problem. The MOI’s solution only touches the superficial, technical issues, such as compensation,” said Hsu Shih-jung (徐世榮), chair of National Chengchi University’s Department of Land Economics, who has played an active role in the farming rights movement and the movement against land expropriation.
“The problem with land seizure is much more complicated than compensating the landowners,” he said.
“For instance, the amendment proposed by the ministry still puts the power to define what the ‘public interest’ is in the hands of local governments — landowners and the government are both stakeholders, but they are in very unequal positions,” he said.
Taiwan Rural Front spokeswoman Tsai Pei-hui (蔡培慧) agreed with Hsu.
“If I am to give a grade to the MOI’s solution, I would give it a failing grade and a very low one,” Tsai said.
She said that when it comes to the environmental issues in a development project, “there’s the environmental impact assessment done by a panel of experts. However, when it comes to deciding whether the project would benefit the public, it’s only governments that have the final say.”
Tsai was also unhappy that the ministry seems to consider compensation the only factor that interests those who oppose land expropriations.
“You know, it’s not always just about money,” she said.
“There are people who simply don’t want to sell their land and don’t want to change their lifestyle, no matter how much money they could get,” Tsai said.
Tsai urged the government to change its “industrial development first” mentality, and put its actions in the context of the global food crisis.
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