Agricultural workers from Hsinchu County yesterday gathered in front of the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) to protest a water conservation and efficiency project that shut down water conveyance facilities without sufficient communication with farmers.
The Irrigation Agency and other agencies under the ministry launched the project to explore feasible limited irrigation strategies for farmland around the Toucian River (頭前溪).
The project involves what the agency calls the “most intense systemic water saving measure,” which was applied to more than 4,000 hectares of fields within the river basin from Friday last week and would continue until July 20 — about the growth and harvest period of the first rice crop.
Photo: Yang Yuan-ting, Taipei Times
A NT$160,000 per hectare subsidy would be given to each agricultural worker who takes part in the project.
Farmers eligible for the subsidy are those whose farms are affected by the system and who have planted their crops before Friday last week. Those who are interested must file their application by the end of this month.
Farmers said the irrigation sluice gates were forcibly shut down on Wednesday last week, immediately after authorities had meetings with them the day before.
The farmers presented rice seedlings that they said had been transplanted from cultivation plates to fields on March 8, but are now withering due to insufficient irrigation.
Agricultural worker Hsu Chung-kuang (許中光), who is also member of the Society of Wilderness, said the irrigation outage was driven not only by climate change, but also by intemperate economic development.
The outage would affect aquatic life in local rivers, too, he said, calling on authorities to maintain the ecological base stream flows to the region.
The agriculture ministry and the Ministry of Economic Affairs should put forward a water control plan instead of “dressing up water suspension as a systemic water saving plan,” Hsu said.
Agency Deputy Director-General Chen Yan-yuan (陳衍源) said the project is far from an irrigation suspension and is a pilot scheme to examine crops’ growth and yield under extreme water-limiting conditions.
“That is why we need crops to be planted in the fields before March 20,” he said, adding that agricultural workers participating the project must continue to work on their fields and cooperate in providing the necessary assistance.
The farmlands within the Toucian River basin were chosen, as the basin is a highly closed water system independent of other water sources and it was unlikely that project participants would be able to get external irrigation water that could affect test results, Chen said.
Asked why the irrigation gates were shut down ahead of the project, Chen said it was a coincidence.
Such measures are part of the county’s rotational irrigation scheme, not the project, he said.
The rotational scheme follows an irrigation cycle of “three days on, two days off,” Chen said, adding that it has long been implemented during the dry season in the first half of a year.
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