Improper farmhouses: Yilan County suspends farmhouse construction permits effective immediately, to propose standard principles in two months
To address the speculation in farmland and the phenomenon of fake farmers building farmhouses, the Agriculture Department of the Yilan County Government today proposed four specific countermeasures: 1) suspend, effective immediately for two months, the issuance of farmer qualifications, farmhouse construction licenses and permits for agricultural facility use; 2) form a task force to establish criteria for determining farmer status and principles for reviewing farmhouse construction; 3) take back the authority to review farmhouse construction licenses to the county government; and 4) speed up the drafting of the Yilan County regional plan.
Yilan County Government: Standards and principles to be proposed within two months, to implement the policy of keeping farmland in agricultural use
According to statistics from the Yilan County Government, since the Agricultural Development Act was amended in 2000 to allow natural persons to buy and sell farmland, 7,600 farmhouses have been built in Yilan County and 1,900 hectares of farmland have been lost, accounting for 7 percent of Yilan's farmland area.
In a recent interview with Newsmarket, Yilan County Magistrate Lin Tsung-hsien said the problem of non-agricultural use of farmland is serious, but because the central government has not amended the law, the local government can only raise the threshold for farmhouse construction or tighten the standards. The original intent of the Agricultural Development Act in allowing farmhouse construction was to concentrate farmhouses into clustered villages, but now they have become scattered dwellings, "which is very troublesome" and affects the area of arable land. Therefore, production zones and residential zones must be delineated, and there are plans to restrict farmhouse construction in sensitive areas such as hillside land, water source areas, wetlands within a certain range, and important protected land.
Yang Huai-chu, a section chief at the Yilan County Agriculture Department, said that in order to curb the rapidly worsening loss of farmland in recent years and implement the "farmland for agricultural use" policy, the county government's bureau and department heads discussed and deliberated together at the end of last year, and thus announced the specific countermeasure plan today.
Regarding the situation in which fake farmers build houses but existing laws offer no remedy, Yilan County decided to "suspend, effective immediately for two months, the issuance of farmer qualifications, farmhouse construction licenses and permits for agricultural facility use." Yang Huai-chu said that most farmhouse construction permits are currently issued by city offices, and in order to re-examine the existing principles and standards, the issuance of farmer qualifications and farmhouse construction licenses is suspended effective immediately. "We will set out the new standards and principles within two months to avoid misjudging real and fake farmers, and in the future we will implement the review."
In the future, the authority to review farmhouse construction licenses and agricultural facility construction licenses will be taken back by the Yilan County Government for unified handling. In addition, the Yilan County Government will hire professionals from inside and outside the government to form a task force to establish criteria for determining farmer status and principles for reviewing farmhouse construction, and to conduct the reviews.
Review authority for farmhouse construction taken back by the county government, scope of farmhouse construction narrowed
Yang Huai-chu said that regarding the review standards for determining farmer status and reviewing farmhouse construction, the county government has roughly drafted the details, but the most important thing at present is to "stop the bleeding in the entire operation first and take the review authority back to the county government." He stressed that many new farmers and second-generation farmers returning home to farm find that the first difficulty they encounter in rural areas is that farmland is hard to obtain; many plots of farmland have luxury farmhouses built on them, becoming tools for investment speculation. The Yilan County Government must safeguard farmers' right to cultivate and to reside, and ensure the sustainable use of farmland.
In addition to redrafting the review standards and principles, Yilan County will also speed up the drafting of the Yilan County regional plan. Yang Huai-chu said that in the long run it must still return to land use controls; farmhouses should not be built in special agricultural zones, and this needs to be restricted at the height of the regional plan to correct the location of farmhouse construction.
Yang Huai-chu said that currently farmhouse construction is restricted in sensitive areas such as wetlands and hillside land in Yilan, and in the future the Yilan County Government hopes to impose further restrictions within special agricultural zones to control farmhouse construction.