In recent years, government ministries have been reorganized several times. The idea was that restructuring the Executive Yuan would cut the number of ministries and improve administration.
However, these expectations have not been met. Instead, restructuring has resulted in ministries growing bigger, with “bureaus” being upgraded to “administrations” and new departments being added, resulting in increased expenditure by the national treasury.
An example of how things can go wrong is that, since the Ministry of Health and Welfare was established in July last year, there has been a succession of food safety problems that have caused widespread resentment and serious concern about the lack of food safety in Taiwan. It is highly questionable whether bureaucratic adjustments of this kind can yield their expected results.
There has also been a lot of discussion about whether, as the planned reorganization of ministries goes ahead, the nation’s forests will fall under the domain of the future ministry of agriculture and forestry or the ministry of environment and resources.
Forests are regarded as a national resource. Up until now, most forests have been managed by the Council of Agriculture’s Forestry Bureau, but some experimental woodlands have been managed by academic institutions such as National Taiwan University, National Chung Hsing University and the National Pingtung University of Science and Technology. Some forests are part of national parks and managed by park authorities.
When the environment and resources ministry is eventually established, the nation’s forests will be divided into sections, with forests that are designated for conservation being managed by the environment and resources ministry, while forestry production is to be managed by the agriculture ministry.
That may seem reasonable, but it is bound to cause confusion about who is actually in charge of certain forest areas.
In a situation where responsibilities and powers are divided, whenever any kind of problem crops up there are sure to be various departments trying to shift responsibility onto one another. Government officials have a tendency to claim credit for anything that goes right, but blame others for anything that goes wrong.
Legislators should have a serious discussion about how to prevent mutual buck-passing and power conflicts. They could hold public hearings and invite experts from academia, business and government departments to discuss these issues before making a final decision.
Forestlands in national parks should be managed by the park authorities. It looks as though the environment and resources ministry will be put in overall charge of them, and that may be the right thing to do.
However, there is a question of whether continued exploitation of forests in national parks that have been made available for exploitation should be banned.
Woodlands used for leisure and tourism are an environmental resource and should be adequately protected rather than being turned into tourist theme parks. Above all, water catchment areas in forest areas need to be protected and managed.
It remains to be seen whether the environment and resources ministry can do a proper job of resource conservation.
Environmental resources are very complicated and should not be allocated and reallocated haphazardly, as that could have a negative impact on the security and sustainable development of the land.
The nation cannot just pursue GDP growth while sacrificing the its precious resources, spoiling people’s living space and ruining their quality of life.
Chou Chang-hung is an academician at Academia Sinica.
Translated by Julian Clegg
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs