The Council of Agriculture (COA) yesterday reiterated its commitment to preventing Chinese garlic from entering Taiwan through a third location, particularly countries in Southeast Asia.
As garlic is one of the 830 items on a list of banned Chinese products, the council said the government was doing everything possible to avoid shipments of Chinese garlic from entering Taiwan via a third country.
The council’s Agriculture and Food Agency notified local importers in a mid-November meeting that strict measures would be adopted to screen for Chinese garlic.
PHOTO: CNA
Importers are required to attach documents — including transport contracts, customs clearance reports and government papers — to verify the origins of their imported goods, as well as documents to identify the producers, producing venues and the size of plantation areas, the council said.
Imported garlic will be sent to Taiwan’s overseas office for examination if it is hard to identify its place of production, it said.
The COA said it also had suggested the Bureau of Foreign Trade ban garlic imports from Vietnam because large amounts of Chinese garlic are shipped from there to Taiwan.
The council’s statement came after hundreds of garlic farmers from Yunlin County staged a protest in front of the county government headquarters on Monday.
The farmers dumped boxes of China-produced garlic that were shipped to Taiwan via Vietnam to protest against what they said was the government’s lack of concern for farmers’ livelihoods.
Some of the protesting farmers said that Vietnam couldn’t cultivate enough garlic to meet its own demand, not to mention the possibility of exporting it.
If Chinese garlic continues to enter Taiwan from Vietnam, it would deal a heavy blow to locally produced garlic, which is set to hit the domestic market one month later, a chief delegate of a local farmers’ association said.
Garlic is one of the major agricultural products in central and southern Taiwan, with 5,400 hectares of farmland in the nation devoted to its cultivation.
Garlic production in Taiwan is valued at about NT$2.1 billion (US$66.03 million) annually, the COA said.
Garlic grown in Yunlin County accounts for 85 percent of the country’s production.
South Korean K-pop girl group Blackpink are to make Kaohsiung the first stop on their Asia tour when they perform at Kaohsiung National Stadium on Oct. 18 and 19, the event organizer said yesterday. The upcoming performances will also make Blackpink the first girl group ever to perform twice at the stadium. It will be the group’s third visit to Taiwan to stage a concert. The last time Blackpink held a concert in the city was in March 2023. Their first concert in Taiwan was on March 3, 2019, at NTSU Arena (Linkou Arena). The group’s 2022-2023 “Born Pink” tour set a
CPBL players, cheerleaders and officials pose at a news conference in Taipei yesterday announcing the upcoming All-Star Game. This year’s CPBL All-Star Weekend is to be held at the Taipei Dome on July 19 and 20.
The Taiwan High Court yesterday upheld a lower court’s decision that ruled in favor of former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) regarding the legitimacy of her doctoral degree. The issue surrounding Tsai’s academic credentials was raised by former political talk show host Dennis Peng (彭文正) in a Facebook post in June 2019, when Tsai was seeking re-election. Peng has repeatedly accused Tsai of never completing her doctoral dissertation to get a doctoral degree in law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1984. He subsequently filed a declaratory action charging that
The Hualien Branch of the High Court today sentenced the main suspect in the 2021 fatal derailment of the Taroko Express to 12 years and six months in jail in the second trial of the suspect for his role in Taiwan’s deadliest train crash. Lee Yi-hsiang (李義祥), the driver of a crane truck that fell onto the tracks and which the the Taiwan Railways Administration's (TRA) train crashed into in an accident that killed 49 people and injured 200, was sentenced to seven years and 10 months in the first trial by the Hualien District Court in 2022. Hoa Van Hao, a
RSS