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Time to stop robbing
the poor to feed the wealthy
By Hsu Shih-jung 徐世榮
When farmers took to the streets of Taipei to protest earlier this month, the
response from the public was tremendous. However, it was only one year ago that
those same farmers staged an overnight protest on Ketagalan Boulevard that seems
to have been largely forgotten. A year has passed, but the government continues
to act as though nothing is wrong even though land expropriation cases have been
just as appalling this year as they were last year.
Why is this happening?
One reason is that the government mistakenly believes land expropriation to be
an important way to develop land and improve its fiscal position.
Government finances are in serious jeopardy, but instead of imposing higher
taxes on the wealthy to boost revenue, the rich are given tax breaks, tax
exemptions and other economic privileges. So where else is the funding for much
needed infrastructure projects to be found? The answer is to use land
expropriation to prop up land development.
Land-related taxes such as the land value tax and land value increment tax are
the main sources of tax income for local governments. In this context, it is
hardly surprising that how to collect more tax revenue becomes the focus of much
policy debate.
In addition, those in power can utilize land development projects to co-opt
local politicians, thereby killing two birds with one stone.
The reason local governments are using every means possible to turn farmland
into urban land is that farmland is not taxable and as such brings in no
revenue. Article 53 of the Executive Yuan’s Equalization of Land Rights Act
(平均地權條例) states that all expansion or renewal of urban planning, or reassignment
of farmland or protected zones as land for construction, must be achieved
through zone expropriation. This has caused the expropriation of farmland to
double.
Zone expropriation allows the government to expropriate large areas of land and
subsequently make huge profits by auctioning it off or selling it by tender.
Because government has the final say when it comes to urban planning, many urban
planning districts have been continually expanded and more designated areas are
being established near industrial and science parks. As a result, urban planning
has gotten out of hand as local governments exaggerate population numbers and
use falsified data as a pretext to turn farmland into urban land.
At present there is a difference of more than 7 million between fabricated
population numbers and the actual population. Although there is still much
unused land in industrial and science parks, meeting the needs of these
exaggerated figures creates the false impression that construction on this land
is necessary.
The government has deliberately established such a distorted mechanism to
expropriate land because it can then carry out its own land development agenda
and significantly increase revenue intake.
It is most regrettable that the strict regulations and guidelines that should
govern land expropriation have been willfully pushed aside, and that the basic
property rights and human rights guaranteed by the Constitution have been
neglected. As a result, the members of one of society’s most disadvantaged
groups — farmers — are being forced to bear the burden of funding government
infrastructure construction.
Social justice is turned on its head in a world where the poor are robbed to
feed the rich.
Hsu Shih-jung is chairman of National Chengchi University’s Department of
Land Economics.
TRANSLATED BY KYLE JEFFCOAT
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