Agricultural development flourishes everywhere, defending rural areas shows results
Lead image / Munch
On December 29 of the 100th year of the Republic of China, besides several civil society groups concerned with land and housing justice holding a press conference to expose the Seventh Legislative Yuan's amendment of the five land laws as a "sham amendment, truly outrageous," the Alliance for the Defense of Rural Homelands, the Land Justice Alliance, and the Taiwan Rural Front also pooled funds to place an advertisement in Apple Daily at a cost equivalent to 12,500 jin of rice, calling on voters to reject the legislators who supported the Executive Yuan version when the "Land Expropriation Act" was amended. With Apple Daily sympathizing with farmers' hard work and running the ad at a public-interest rate, the government's deception of farmers was made known to the public nationwide, and on the very night the ad appeared, the message was shared more than 5,000 times online, receiving an enthusiastic response from the public nationwide.
The amendment of the Land Expropriation Act is a "sham amendment and a real vote-buying trick." The Alliance for the Defense of Rural Homelands especially stresses: land expropriation is absolutely not a question of price compensation. The main problem lies in excessive expropriation, that is, the lack of public interest and necessity; in addition, farmers have also demonstrated their insistence on food sovereignty. At present, Taiwan's food self-sufficiency rate reaches only 32%, far lower than that of countries such as Japan and Switzerland, which also have smallholder farming systems, and recent extreme weather has turned Thailand, a major rice-exporting country, into an importing country overnight. Excessive reliance on imported food has in fact endangered national security. When countries around the world are beginning to see the importance of food self-sufficiency, the Taiwan government, while claiming it wants to raise the food self-sufficiency rate, keeps destroying farmland; in the eyes of farmers, this is simply an act of national destruction. Even the market-price expropriation promised by President Ma (again, what farmers want is not market-price compensation, but an end to excessive expropriation and insistence on food sovereignty) has become a "fake market price" in which both the timing and the price of implementation are set by government agencies.
With the Executive Yuan operating forcefully and ruling-party legislators acting as a voting bloc, just as President Ma has said, "full governance, full responsibility," President Ma must of course bear full political responsibility, and farmers have already lost confidence in the current ruling authorities.
When President Ma went to Zhudong on the evening of the 29th to campaign street by street, what farmers saw filled them with worry. They felt that current elections are all about currying favor with the crowd and comparing who has more people, but none truly care about the voices of the people, so they resolved to shout their heartfelt concerns to the president. However, the police kept farmers far away, and the Zhubei police transferred in even forbade farmers from using loudspeakers. The president could not hear the farmers' cries, and paid them no heed; the campaign team even sent a cheering squad to shout at the farmers! Are oppressed farmers not allowed to have a voice? Are they not allowed to be heard? Is President Ma, who claims to "listen to the voices of the people," really going to force every farmer to go down the path of drinking poison like Grandma Zhu of Dapu?
President Ma only sent a section chief from the Public Affairs Office to receive the petition and promised a reply within one week. Farmers felt extremely disappointed by such handling. Farmers have already spent several nights sleeping on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office, protested in front of the Legislative Yuan, and expressed their demands to administrative agencies several times. If the Ma government still focuses only on "votes" and turns a deaf ear to excessive expropriation, the Alliance for the Defense of Rural Homelands will link up with more farmers' groups, letting the voice against excessive expropriation bloom across rural Taiwan, and calls on farmers everywhere to use their votes to reject the vicious government that "bullies" farmers! (The author is the chairman of the Alliance for the Defense of Rural Homelands)