The aquaculture industry in southern Taiwan suffered unprecedented losses in floods triggered by Typhoon Morakot earlier this month, with its grouper culture ponds, which turn out nearly 60 percent of the world’s grouper production in terms of value, almost completely wiped out, an industry source said yesterday.
A post-Morakot investigation conducted by the Council of Agriculture (COA) showed that of the 1,500 hectares of grouper ponds in Taiwan, more than 90 percent have been damaged.
The COA reported that as of 3pm on Friday, Morakot’s damage to the aquaculture industry amounted to NT$4.14 billion (US$126 million). In Jiadong (佳冬) and Linbian (林邊) alone, the losses to the fish culture industry might reach NT$3 billion, Pingtung County Commissioner Tsao Chi-hung (曹啟鴻) said.
Hsieh Chin-huei (謝錦輝), president of the Aquaculture Development Association, said that it might take the grouper culture industry more than a year to recover.
Groupers, a high value fish product, earn the nation a large amount of foreign exchange every year. Last year, Taiwan’s NT$3.88 billion in grouper production represented 58 percent of the world’s overall production for the popular fish.
As the coastal townships of Jiadong and Linbian in Pingtung County suffered the heaviest toll in terms of aquaculture losses, the commissioner is looking for ways to help alleviate difficulties for fish farmers.
“For those people affected by the typhoon who owe banks, we can adopt a special measure to cancel their debt,” Tsao told reporters.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
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