Top Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidates offered their ideas on agriculture and taxes yesterday as their campaigns took them to the DPP’s traditional base of support in the rural south, weeks before the presidential primaries begin.
Over the weekend, presidential hopeful Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) visited Yunlin County and rural Greater Kaohsiung, both agricultural powerhouses where she spoke about the importance of an industry she said deserved recognition as being important to “national security.”
“Food supply is an issue of national security. If the [DPP] returns to power, we will need to re-evaluate our agricultural policies and how to improve the development of that sector into one that is more sophisticated and more technology-based,” she said.
During a meeting with Yunlin County Commissioner Su Chih-fen (蘇治芬), Tsai, who has temporarily stepped down as DPP chairperson, praised the local government for seeking to turn the region, a major producer of coffee, tea and rice, into an “agricultural capital,” adding that more long-term farming subsidies should be provided by the government.
In 2008, the DPP began taking a new look at Taiwan’s economic makeup and found that the country was overreliant on industrial value-added processing, Tsai said.
This made the country more vulnerable to developing economies, including China, with lower wages and more lax regulations, she said.
“In truth, what can best sustain Taiwan’s economic development is agriculture … Not traditional agriculture, but sophisticated, high-quality and technological agricultural products,” Tsai said. “Taiwan has the talent and the technological expertise to make it work.”
A short distance away in Greater Tainan, the other DPP frontrunner, former premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), shared his ideas about giving additional tax rebates and other subsidies to encourage charitable giving to disadvantaged groups.
“Taiwanese have a lot of kindness, but what they lack is encouragement and a system to make it work,” Su said after meeting with charitable groups. “People who support those groups should be given support ... through tax breaks.”
The former premier also spoke about Tsai’s proposal to phase out the nuclear industry in Taiwan, saying that a “nuclear-free homeland” was a “good idea,” but he stopped short of endorsing the idea. Such an important measure needed more public deliberation, he said.
“We need more time to make the appropriate preparations and there has to be a consensus also present in the legislature,” he said.
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