Lifting the ban on selected Chinese imports of agricultural and aquatic products is a necessary aspect of the negotiation of the cross-strait trade in goods agreement, the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) said yesterday.
Currently, imports of 615 Chinese agricultural and aquatic products remain banned to protect Taiwan’s agricultural and fishery industries.
Although Beijing hopes Taiwan can lift the ban on all the restricted items, Taipei does not plan to concede, Minister of Economic Affairs John Deng (鄧振中) said.
“We have to evaluate the impact of Chinese imports on Taiwan’s industries,” Deng said.
“Our aim is to ink a high-quality trade agreement with China, meaning that Taiwan and China have to eliminate tariff duties for 90 percent of both sides’ products,” Industrial Development Bureau Director-General Wu Ming-ji (吳明機) said at the ministry’s year-end news conference.
Wu’s remarks are the first time the ministry has said explicitly that the goal of the goods agreement with China is to remove tariffs on 90 percent of products.
To ensure the protection of Taiwan’s agricultural and fishery industries, the government is in the process of drafting an import restriction removal period specifically for Chinese agricultural and aquatic imports, Wu said.
The longest tariff-elimination period is currently 15 years, according to the structure of the agreement that has been agreed by both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
The import restriction removal period for Chinese agricultural and aquatic imports might be longer than 15 years, an official who is familiar with the negotiation process said.
Commenting on Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) chairman Terry Gou’s (郭台銘) recent complaints that the government has neglected the needs of the nation’s panel industry, Wu said that businesses should understand that there is no way that the negotiation of an agreement can satisfy every industry’s need.
Gou on Dec. 21 complained to reporters that unlike the government-backed semiconductor industry, Taiwan’s panelmakers do not have the authorities’ support.
“I cannot comment too much at this stage as the negotiations are not completed. I can only say that we are still trying to fight for the interests of Taiwan’s panel industry,” Wu said.
As the negotiation of the agreement is in its final stages, the remaining issues over tariff reductions are becoming harder for negotiators to resolve, Deng said.
“We would not hold the next formal talks over the agreement unless Taipei and Beijing make some progress over the remaining tariff reductions,” Deng said, adding that the ministry has not set a timeframe for the next round of negotiations.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy