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La Via Campesina Taiwan, China Visit Feature (7): A Field Record of Water and Land in Xizhou

General News By Emily Carter 0 views

Editor’s note: This article is part of the “La Via Campesina 2012 Taiwan Visit Special Series”; for the related itinerary and other articles in the series, please see the links at the end of this article.

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La Via Campesina, a grassroots peasant movement from around the world, came to Taiwan, and the itinerary for 5/27 was Xizhou Township in Changhua. The area now faces a conflict between industrial water use for the fourth phase of the Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP Phase 4) and agricultural water use; a pipeline 22 km long is to be built to carry agricultural water to CTSP Phase 4. The area is already in a state of “supply four, stop six” (four days of water supply, six days without), and when there is no irrigation from the Cizai Pi Canal, farmers have no choice but to pump groundwater for irrigation. So of course farmers strongly oppose sending agricultural water to CTSP Phase 4 as well.

A protest against water grabbing is currently under way. Tents have been set up beside the Cizai Pi Canal, and every day people take turns keeping watch at the tents to block continued excavation for the project. So far the sit-in protest has lasted more than twenty days. As for CTSP Phase 4, because AU Optronics, which had originally been expected to move in and build a large plant, has confirmed it will not come, the originally planned optoelectronics industrial park now faces the need to transform into a science park focused mainly on precision machinery. Water demand has decreased, but this makes farmers think all the more that, if that is the case, why not simply recycle and use wastewater from nearby industrial zones instead of touching agricultural water.

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