A proposed legislation at the Senate wants to provide \u201ccontinuity and security\u201d for agricultural and grazing permit holders in the CNMI.<\/p>\n
Sen. Steve Mesngon (R-Rota) introduced Senate Bill 19-17, which also seeks to extend the term of the agriculture and grazing permits so that farmers may have a \u201cfair opportunity to earn a reasonable return on their investments.\u201d<\/p>\n
The agricultural and grazing permit is good for one year.<\/p>\n
Mesngon\u2019s bill was part of the agenda at a Senate session on Thursday.<\/p>\n
According to Mesngon, the one-year permit is an \u201cinsufficient time span\u201d for agricultural and grazing use of public lands.<\/p>\n
The Department of Public Lands and Department of Lands and Natural Resources are the agencies issuing the permits.<\/p>\n
CNMI farmers and ranchers have been \u201climited\u201d by the said agencies to just one year, Mesngon noted.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf immediate attention is not paid to preserving fertile land, all such remaining land may be permanently lost to other forms of development,\u201d Mesngon\u2019s bill noted.<\/p>\n
The bill further noted that the loss of the tillable land and grazeable land would make the Commonwealth immensely dependent upon the foreign importation of agricultural products.<\/p>\n
The bill also warned that, \u201csuch irreversible foreign dependence is undesirable.\u201d<\/p>\n
The bill recommends a longer permit period of five years. The DPL and DLNR can also charge a \u201creasonable\u201d fee for such an extension.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A proposed legislation at the Senate wants to provide \u201ccontinuity and security\u201d for agricultural and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[26,346,2331,1411],"class_list":["post-204610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-cnmi","tag-dlnr","tag-public-lands","tag-senate-bill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}