How should the arbitrary felling of forests on farmland be regulated?
The Snake King Palace forest near Zhanghu Eco Elementary and Junior High School in Gukeng, Yunlin has a 60-year history, and it is home to fireflies in teeming abundance as well as animals such as the masked palm civet, ferret badger and crab-eating mongoose. Yet in the middle of last month it was suddenly subjected to indiscriminate logging, leaving the entire hillside bare and the dense forest instantly turned into a "Grave of the Fireflies," shocking society. The developer not only failed to draft a soil and water conservation development plan before secretly starting to log ahead of schedule, but also cut trees on state-owned land for which no application had been approved. In the end, it was fined 190,000 under the Soil and Water Conservation Act and referred for investigation on charges of unlawful occupation.
Of the 1.4 hectares of hillside land that was indiscriminately logged, two parcels belong to the National Property Administration, with land-use categories of agricultural and pastoral land, and another parcel is under the jurisdiction of the Yunlin County Government, with a land-use category of recreational land, which is expected to be used in the future as a workers' recreation center. Judging from the land-use categories, this hillside land has not been designated as forestry land, so even if the trees on it are subjected to indiscriminate clearing and logging, the Forestry Bureau has no jurisdiction and cannot use the Forest Act to convict the operator leasing the land.
Forestry Bureau, environmental groups: the Regional Plan Act needs to be reviewed
To prevent such regrettable incidents from happening again, legislator Yu Wan-ju held a public hearing yesterday and proposed amending the Forest Act to write the definition of "natural forest" into the law. In addition to primary forest, Yu's definition of natural forest also includes secondary forest; that is, in addition to bringing under protection "natural primary forest" that has not been affected by human disturbance, climate change and other factors, "secondary forest" that was once logged or used or affected by natural disasters and then, through natural succession, recovered to a primary forest state must also be included. In areas designated as natural forest in the future, logging would be restricted and a general survey would be required every 5 to 10 years, and a dedicated restoration fund would be established for natural forest.
However, the Forestry Bureau representatives and environmental groups attending the public hearing coincidentally mentioned that amending the Forest Act cannot stop cases similar to the Snake King Palace forest from happening again, because that forest is agricultural and pastoral land. If such hillside forest is to return to mountain forest conservation, it is necessary to go back to the Regional Plan Act, with local governments taking the lead in reviewing and revising the designation of land-use categories, changing agricultural and pastoral land to forestry land, so that it can be protected under the Forest Act.
Pan Zheng-zheng, a researcher at the Citizens of the Earth Foundation, believes that the Snake King Palace case not only highlights a loophole in the management of the National Property Administration, which owns the land, in leasing land to operators, but also that if the conservation of hillside forest is to be reviewed, it cannot be solved simply by amending the Forest Act, because it involves the property rights and interests of farmers currently leasing state-owned land for cultivation.
According to the 2010 "Fourth Forest Resource Survey," forest not classified as forest land amounted to about 420,000 hectares. (Image source / Forestry Bureau, Council of Agriculture)