Forty farmers from central Taiwan’s Changhua County gathered in front of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) Thursday to protest against the re-allocation of irrigation water for the Erlin Science Park.
“Farmers not only lack water for irrigation, they also have to endure the pollution risk from illegal construction,” said Wu Yin-ning, a poet and member of an anti-water re-allocation group.
The farmers, from Changhua County’s Hsichou Township, submitted a notification letter to the EPA to protest the transfer of the county’s agricultural water resources to the Central Taiwan Science Park’s (CTSP’s) fourth expansion site in Erlin and to demand that environmental reassessments be conducted on the park’s alterations to nearby waterways to divert the farmers’ water.
In response, Yeh Chun-hung, director of the agency’s Department of Comprehensive Planning, said the EPA will abide by environmental laws in the reassessment of the Erlin Science Park’s environmental impact and reply within 60 days.
According to the law, any construction project that covers over 10 hectares of land needs to pass an environmental impact assessment. However, construction of the science park has already begun, even though an impact assessment has not been made, said Lu Shih-wei, a lawyer for the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association.
Lu said a 24.3 meter pipeline along the Erlin River that is designed to redirect water into a 13-hectare water filtration and purification system has already been built.
Hsieh Pao-yuan, chairman of the anti-water re-allocation group, said water from the waterways around Erlin River, which irrigates more than 18,000 hectares of farmland in three townships in the county — Hsichou, Erlin and Pitou — was already scarce before the park took it.
Allocating the 6.65 tonnes of agricultural water resources to the park is cruelty toward farmers, he said.
Wu accused the Chang Hua Irrigation Association of failing to defend farmers’ rights and of colluding with the science park by selling it the water at a knockdown price of just NT$3.3 (US$ 0.11) per tonne.
The science park constructions beside the Erlin River and the irrigation association’s sale of the water are illegal, according to Lu.
The battle between farmers and industry over agricultural water resources often forces farmers to dig their own wells, but these wells have now been capped as part of government efforts to prevent land subsidence that is putting the high speed railway at risk, Wu said.
The EPA should assess the impact of the construction of the science park in terms of agricultural water resources and land subsidence, said Wu.
One 80-year-old farmer noted that under Japanese colonial rule from 1895 to 1945, farmers received 100 percent of the area’s agricultural water resources, but by the 1960s and 1970s, only 57 percent was allocated to them. More recently, with the construction of the Sixth Naphtha Cracking Plants Project, the allocation has dropped to a mere 35 percent.
