Hundreds of people, including farmers and farming activists from Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan and Malaysia, yesterday rallied against the globalization of agriculture on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office, protesting against the government’s plans to lift more bans on agricultral imports.
“We gather here today to express our anger, we want to tell the government that we’re fed up with their compromises on our food sovereignty, it’s a serious problem that our food self-sufficiency has dropped to 33 percent now,” Taiwan Rural Front (TRF) spokeswoman Tsai Pei-hui (蔡培慧) told the crowd at the rally. “You’ve put our dining tables and refrigerators in other people’s homes, we want to keep them in our own places.”
In addition to a series of heated protests against land expropriations that have been going on for years, farmers and farming activists are worried that the government may soon lift the bans on imports of 830 categories of farm products from China, as well as pork products from the US, despite President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) repeated promises that he would not do so.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
“During the presidential campaign, Ma promised numerous times that he would not lift the bans on imports of 830 categories of farm products from China, but now, Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Bao-ji (陳保基) is saying that the bans ‘may’ be lifted,” said National Cheng Chi University land economics professor Hsu Shih-jung (徐世榮), a long-time advocate of farmers’ rights. “When the government decided to lift the ban on imports of certain US beef products amid strong opposition from the public, Ma also firmly promised that the imports of US pork products would remain banned — yet the US government is now pressuring the Ma administration to lift the ban.”
Hsu said farmers across the country now “have little confidence in this incapable government” and therefore gathered to voice their opposition to free trade in the agricultural sector and to call on the government to insist on agricultural sovereignty.
Henry Saragih, the general coordinator of the Jakarta, Indonesia, office of international small farmers’ organization La Via Campesina, said that the problems that Taiwanese farmers encounter are the same for farmers across the world.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
La Via Campesina is an international coalition of peasants’ movements with 148 member groups in 69 countries around the world.
“Land grabbing, loss of food sovereignty and an increasing number of people threatened by famine — now reaching more than 1 billion — are problems created by the WTO, globalization and neo-liberalism,” Saragih said.
He said that Thailand, for instance, which originally had a diverse agricultural sector, now specializes in producing rice for export, and has to import other produce.
South Korea has become an exporter of electronic products, “and since most of its farmland has been taken by the industrial sector, some South Korean agricultural companies now grab land in Africa — especially Madagascar — to grow produce to be imported back to South Korea, leaving Madagascan farmers landless,” Saragih said.
Wirat Phromson, a member of the Northern Peasants’ Federation Thailand, urged farmers in Taiwan to continue their struggle.
Citing the farming rights movement in Thailand, Phromson said that despite the seeming flexibility of the Thai government and its promise to revise laws, “the [Thai] government eventually amended laws concerning the agricultural sector, but not for the interests of the peasants. Rather, it was for the interests of big corporations.”
“We want to tell our brothers and sisters in Taiwan and in Via Campesina: Do not believe those empty promises of the government,” he said. “We can’t let people from outside take valuable resources from us and impose on us the sufferings of hunger.”
Following performances by musicians in the evening, the rally ended with protesters throwing bundles of straw toward the Presidential Office.
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
BEIJING’S ‘PAWN’: ‘We, as Chinese, should never forget our roots, history, culture,’ Want Want Holdings general manager Tsai Wang-ting said at a summit in China The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday condemned Want Want China Times Media Group (旺旺中時媒體集團) for making comments at the Cross-Strait Chinese Culture Summit that it said have damaged Taiwan’s sovereignty, adding that it would investigate if the group had colluded with China in the matter and contravened cross-strait regulations. The council issued a statement after Want Want Holdings (旺旺集團有限公司) general manager Tsai Wang-ting (蔡旺庭), the third son of the group’s founder, Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), said at the summit last week that the group originated in “Chinese Taiwan,” and has developed and prospered in “the motherland.” “We, as Chinese, should never
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
INDO-PACIFIC REGION: Royal Navy ships exercise the right of freedom of navigation, including in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, the UK’s Tony Radakin told a summit Freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region is as important as it is in the English Channel, British Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin said at a summit in Singapore on Saturday. The remark came as the British Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, is on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific region as head of an international carrier strike group. “Upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and with it, the principles of the freedom of navigation, in this part of the world matters to us just as it matters in the
RSS