The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday urged the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to ask China to respect Taiwan's intellectual property rights (IPR) on agricultural produce.
Council Vice Chairman Liu Te-shun (劉德勳) made the call ahead of the KMT's cross-strait agricultural forum to be held with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China tomorrow.
Liu said that many famous agricultural products from Taiwan have been pirated by China and some well-known produce trademarks have been illegally registered by Chinese farmers, seriously damaging the rights of Taiwanese farmers.
In addition to hurting Taiwan's farmers economically, the bogus produce are of inferior quality, which could damage Taiwan's reputation for its quality produce.
"However, although we have raised this issue to Chinese government, it has never responded with any concrete method for stopping pirating by some Chinese factories," Liu said while attending a forum on the problems and strategies of cross-strait agricultural interaction.
Liu said that since both Taiwan and China are WTO members, they could negotiate through the WTO about intellectual property rights issues.
"Southeast Asian countries enjoy preferential tariff-free treatment in exporting their produce to China, which was a settlement reached in the WTO," Liu said. "However, the tariff-free status that China gave Taiwan is an agreement reached in a KMT-CCP forum, which has no guarantee and is full of uncertainties."
"Obviously, it was a political maneuver by Beijing," he said.
Liu said that China has proposed speeding up the customs clearance and improve the transparency of the quarantine system and also promote the concept of "green channel" which means allowing some produce to be exempt from customs examination.
Earlier in the day, council Chairman Joseph Wu (
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