Farmhouse Sales Restricted to Farmers Only: Ministry of the Interior Previews Draft Amendment
Taiwan, China, is overrun with fake farmhouses. The Council of Agriculture (COA) had originally planned to announce by the end of June an amendment to the "Regulations for the Construction of Farmhouses on Agricultural Land", explicitly stipulating that both the builders and the buyers of farmhouses (excluding inheritance) must qualify as farmers, but word spread that under election pressure it "was put on hold" and stalled at the Ministry of the Interior. On the evening of the 15th, the Ministry of the Interior finally posted the advance notice of the amended provisions on its website, matching the earlier COA version; after a 10-day period to gather opinions from all sides, the Ministry of the Interior will then make a formal announcement, and the rules could take effect as early as the end of next month.
Yet although the amendment has drawn widespread attention, the Ministry of the Interior chose to post the advance notice online on the evening of July 15, while the stated date of the notice was July 14, meaning the 10-day starting point for collecting opinions on the amendment was abruptly cut to only 9 days, leaving people puzzled as to why the Ministry of the Interior needed to be so low-key, and it also appears to raise suspicion of a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.
In response, Lin Ping-hsun, director of the Comprehensive Planning Division of the Construction and Planning Agency under the Ministry of the Interior, said it may have been public relations posting the advance notice online early, but the actual notice must be based on today's Executive Yuan gazette, with the ten-day opinion-gathering period starting then and running through the 27th of this month.
In 2000, the Legislative Yuan amended the Agricultural Development Act, allowing non-farmers to buy and sell farmland, and buyers of already-built farmhouses did not need to have farmer status, like opening Pandora's box; luxury farmhouses sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain, and farmland prices soared.
In May of this year, COA Minister Chen Bao-ji said that the "Regulations for the Construction of Farmhouses on Agricultural Land" were being amended to require that builders of farmhouses have farmers' insurance, or Category 3 health insurance (fishing and animal husbandry), or present proof related to agricultural operations, and that buyers of farmhouses be subject to the same rules, with the only exception being inheritance of an existing family farmhouse, which still requires the farmland to be used for agriculture.
At the time he vowed that an advance notice was expected by the end of May, with announcement and implementation by the end of June. But after the amended provisions were sent to the Ministry of the Interior, another unit handling related business, word shockingly spread in early June that under election pressure, the Executive Yuan had demanded they be "put on hold", and they were stuck at the Ministry of the Interior, unable to move.
On July 14, Minister of the Interior Chen Wei-ren said the advance notice would be issued as early as this week; when a reporter called the COA's Soil and Water Conservation Bureau that day, Deputy Director-General Lin Chang-li also said the same, "and the Ministry of the Interior has not changed the earlier COA version."
Yesterday (the 15th), the Ministry of the Interior website quietly published the advance notice in the evening, and it indeed matched what Chen Bao-ji had said earlier, explicitly stipulating that builders and transferees of farmhouses must have the above-mentioned farmer qualifications; Article 2 also specifically added: "The construction of such farmhouses shall not affect the agricultural production environment and rural development."
During the earlier legislative amendment, some outside observers had questioned why buyers of farmhouses must also be farmers; in the explanatory notes to the amended provisions, a Judicial Yuan interpretation was specifically cited: "Legal authorization...should be judged by the relevant meaning expressed by the law as a whole, rather than being rigidly bound to the wording of a specific legal provision." In other words, although the parent law, the Agricultural Development Act, does not stipulate the qualifications of transferees, the COA believes that if builders must be subject to farmer rules, transferees should also be subject to the same standard.
Since the "Regulations for the Construction of Farmhouses on Agricultural Land" are an administrative order, not involving legislative amendment, they do not need review by the Legislative Yuan, and may be announced and implemented at any time once the 10-day notice period has expired.
