Text by Wu Chi-jung, Specialist, Forests and Land Division, Citizens of the Earth Foundation

My maternal grandmother's home is in Puyan, Changhua, and my work at the Citizens of the Earth Foundation involves land-use planning and the issue of illegal factories. My hometown, Changhua, happens to be a major county for illegal factories. In trying to sort through the illegal factory issue, I keep thinking about the industrial relationship between agriculture and industry, and what possible solutions exist in terms of spatial planning.

As long as you eat out, you can't escape it - can we change it together?

Recently, many members of the public have paid attention to the illegal factory issue because of the conflict between the 912 plan announced by County Magistrate Wei Ming-ku (only illegal factories newly built after September 12 of this year will be demolished) and the 520 plan finalized by the central government (illegal factories newly added after May 20 last year will be demolished). But most of the public, being consumers, have directed their attention to the question of how to eat and how to buy Taiwan's agricultural products. What the Citizens of the Earth Foundation hopes for is not to keep reinforcing the difficulties of agricultural production, but to promote an overall stocktaking and improvement of Taiwan's agricultural system.

Farmland throughout western Taiwan is heavily filled with illegal factories. This is our real predicament, but we hope that society's overall thinking and local governance will change, and certainly not that consumers will start talking en masse about eating Japanese rice or rice from Hualien and Taitung, about there being no factories. Hearing such remarks actually makes one feel sorrowful.

I want to tell you that as a consumer, there is no escaping how Changhua's agricultural products are eaten. As long as you eat out, you cannot avoid it. I hope that we can change it together, and find a way to make this society and this government treat the agricultural production environment a little better.

The illegal factory problem is actually quite severe, especially for agricultural production, whether in terms of farmland prices, farmland fragmentation, or the inability to form an agricultural brand image. In my view, Changhua's farmland problem is the problem of agricultural development across all of Taiwan.

Recovering lost farmland! Only 570,000 hectares left in agricultural production | 100,000 hectares of farmland used for non-agricultural purposes | Online in September for everyone to root out violations

Latest stocktaking: 130,000 illegal factories on farmland! Council of Agriculture: Half of newly established illegal factories to be demolished by year-end, farmhouses the next target