The Consumers' Foundation wants the government to establish a mechanism to stabilize produce prices during typhoon season or heavy rains to eliminate profiteering by middlemen.
As of 4pm yesterday, agricultural losses nationwide were estimated to have reached NT$975.96 million (US$30 million), with damages to produce accounting for 90 percent, or NT$885.93 million, according to statistics posted on the Council of Agriculture's Web site.
Retail prices of vegetables have soared dramatically as supplies have dropped.
Prices of leafy vegetables on Sunday rose 150.14 percent from May 26 with those for Chinese cabbage soaring a whopping 429.2 percent, the statistics showed.
Although rootstocks prices only rose 51.39 percent during the same period, the price of green onions skyrocketed 374.29 percent.
While some price hikes are reasonable given that 24,840 hectares of farmland have been flooded, the foundation said others are the result of profiteering.
"The government has pledged to hunt down greedy middlemen for more than two decades, to no avail. Every year when the rainy and typhoon seasons come, exploitation of vegetable prices occurs again and again," Consumers' Foundation (消基會) chairman Jason Lee (李鳳翱) said yesterday.
The foundation suggested that the government help establish a nationwide network of distribution centers, refrigeration facilities and transportation fleet so that farmers are able to ship their farm produce directly to retailers, reducing their dependence on middlemen.
But this does not mean that the role of middlemen should be eliminated, said Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群), an associate professor of agricultural economics at National Taiwan University.
"The existence of middlemen is a result of the market economy and most of them are good businesspeople making reasonable profits," said Sun, who is also the Consumers' Foundation's director and controller.
The government's major task, however, is to crack down on the handful of black sheep who drive up prices to cause market instability, he said.
Council for Economic Planning and Development Chairman Hu Sheng-cheng (胡勝正) said on Sunday that consumer prices were likely to increase more than 2 percent this year if bad weather continues to push up fruit and vegetable prices.
The government should map out measures to prevent massive price fluctuations, rather than scrambling to resolve the problem afterwards, the foundation said.
Sun suggested consumers can make purchases at supermarkets run by farmers' associations, the Taipei Agricultural Products Marketing Co (台北農產運銷公司), or major hypermarkets.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by