Taiwan is drafting a public statement to slam Greenpeace activists for boarding a fishing boat in the South Pacific earlier this week to check for an illegal shark fin harvest, a fisheries official said yesterday.
The Fisheries Agency will send a protest letter to the multilateral Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission and to Greenpeace, the international environmental group that the government says inappropriately forced its way onto a Taiwan-registered boat on Monday to inspect the shark catch.
Activists on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza obtained the Taiwanese crew��s permission to board the ship in waters east of the Solomon Islands, Greenpeace oceans campaigner Jason Collins said.
After boarding the fishing vessel, they found about 110kg of shark fins, he said.
The amount of separated shark fins probably exceeded the legal weight limit, he said.
Although shark catches are legal, the 25-country fishing commission restricts the weight of severed fins per boat to ensure that live sharks are not being thrown back into the ocean.
��Then they just sink to the bottom and die,�� Collins said.
In response, Fisheries Agency deputy director-general James Sha (�F�Ӥ@) said the agency would send a letter of protest to Greenpeace for its actions against the Taiwanese fishing boat.
��The boat was sailing on the high seas and according to international law, it��s the country where the boat is registered that has jurisdiction over it when it��s sailing on the high seas,�� Sha told the Taipei Times by telephone.
��Greenpeace is not in any position to intervene, especially when it��s a non-governmental organization, not a state law enforcement body,�� he said.
He said the fishing boat did not violate any Taiwanese law.
In response to Collins�� statement that activists on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza had obtained permission from the fishing vessel��s crew prior to boarding to check the catch, Sha said that ��the captain gave the permission only because he felt the crew��s safety was threatened [by the activists].��
��We will protest to Greenpeace directly and to the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission,�� Sha said.
Taiwan is a member of the international commission ��and we want to know why our fishing boat��s safety wasn��t guaranteed,�� he said.
Shark fin soup is considered a delicacy in Taiwan and in Chinese restaurants in other countries.
More than 100 shark species are being ��commercially exploited,�� casting doubt on the long-term survival of some of them, the Switzerland-based Shark Foundation has said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS