An inter-ministry task force is scheduled to meet on Tuesday to discuss national grain production following a recent surge in global grain prices, a Council of Agriculture official said yesterday.
Agriculture and Food Agency Deputy Director-General Yu Sheng-feng (游勝鋒) said the meeting will study the possibility of local cultivation given that the country’s self-sufficiency in wheat, corn and soybeans is less than 12 percent.
He also said that Taiwan has planted wheat and soybeans before, but always had poor harvests.
“We need to find suitable strains of the two crops to help promote local production,” Yu said.
He added that the nation currently has 5,000 hectares of corn and that it plans to step up the use of fallow land to increase that to 7,000 hectares this year.
One of the incentives will be to subsidize corn farmers NT$45,000 per hectare, with farmers’ associations promising to purchase the corn at NT$8 per kilogram, Yu said.
The meeting will also assess the feasibility of state-owned Taiwan Sugar Corp (Taisugar) increasing the planting of sugar cane and production of sugar. Taisugar has diversified in recent years into other products such as hogs away from its former staple of sugar-related products.
At the request of Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), the task force has been formed by the council, the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of the Interior, with the objective of stabilizing domestic food supply and the price of imported food.
The council said that the nation’s self-sufficiency rate in rice is as high as 95 percent, but it relies heavily on imported grain for -livestock feed.
Taiwan imports 5 million tonnes of corn for animal feed every year and 2 million tonnes of soybeans, and is therefore at the mercy of hikes in import prices and fluctuations in the supply of imported products.
At a separate setting yesterday, Wu said the Cabinet would continue to monitor the situation for unreasonable increases.
“We should not let high import prices hurt our consumers,” the premier said. “We will watch closely to make sure any price hikes are reasonable, and take effective and proper action to dissuade business people from increasing prices to unreasonable levels.”
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