Chicken farmers may attribute the recent drop in prices of poultry to a possible decrease in consumption of meat throughout the country, but information released by the Taiwan Institute for Sustainable Energy tells a different story.
Data from the institute shows the average Taiwanese consumes 77.1kg of meat each year, exceeding that of people in China, Japan and South Korea and slightly trailing Americans and Germans.
Council of Agriculture data from 2006 shows that the amount of meat consumed each year in Taiwan per person is more than 16kg greater than China, at 60.8kg, and far more than the average consumption of 40kg in Japan and South Korea, and close to Germany’s 79.1kg and 77.3kg in the US.
Eugene Chien (簡又新), chairman of the Taiwan Institute for Sustainable Energy, cited a recommendation from Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that in order to help delay the effects of global warming, the public should eat less meat, use bicycles to travel and decrease consumption.
In order to meet its goals of conserving energy, the Council for Economic Planning and Development will establish a task force to evaluate environmental policies aimed at energy conservation. It invited Chien to present a report on the effects of climate change on Taiwan.
A former head of the Environmental Protection Agency and minister for foreign affairs, Chien said that every 1kg of beef is equal to consuming 10kg of wheat, producing 36kg of carbon dioxide, and more than 100 types of toxic gas — produced by cows — eroding 35kg of surface soil.
Chien also recommended energy conservation in other areas.
Citing architecture as an example, he said energy can be conserved by using more efficient lighting, home appliances and air-conditioning or insulating walls. In industrial technology, energy can be conserved using hybrid cars, changing raw materials and using alternatives to fossil fuels.
In agriculture, changes can be made to methods of raising livestock, sewage systems and decreasing production of carbon dioxide, he said.
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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