Taiwan's top trade official to the WTO confirmed Thursday that the nation has been invited to participate in a G-10 Group agricultural ministers' meeting set for July 5 in Geneva.
Yen Ching-chang (
It is believed that this will be the highest-level meeting in which Taiwan will have participated in Geneva since the country became a WTO member in January 2002. The G-10 Group -- made up of Taiwan, Bulgaria, Israel, Iceland, Japan, Mauritius, Norway, Switzerland, South Korea and Liechtenstein -- is aimed at protecting and advancing the agricultural interests of its members.
Noting that the main purpose of the forthcoming meeting is to consolidate the G-10 Group members' common negotiating position and to show the group's political strength in agricultural talks, Yen said that due to the importance of agricultural negotiations, Taiwan's presence at the gathering is significant.
Lee's participation in the meeting also demonstrates the substantial benefits that Taiwan has gained from its WTO membership and the fruitful results of the efforts made by its delegation to the WTO in the past two years, he said.
Deiss, who is also minister of economic affairs, said in his invitation letter that as the negotiation mechanism of the Doha New Round trade talks is expected to be completed at the end of next month and that the most important issues of agricultural trade talks have entered a critical stage, the forthcoming meeting will not only give the G-10 Group ministers an opportunity to exchange their views, but will also give them an opportunity to discuss ways of strengthening their joint stance in the talks.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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