Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson and presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday pledged to overhaul the nation’s struggling agricultural industry if elected next year.
Tsai promised to develop technological aspects of the business that she said would help revitalize the industry and turn it into a driving force for economic development, instead of a drag on government revenue.
“Once we regain governance in 2012, the DPP will start thinking about how the agricultural industry will develop in the future,” Tsai told a gathering of agricultural business professionals in Taipei. “There are many things we can do to help the agricultural business.”
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
Her comments come in the wake of a DPP plan to increase benefits for elderly farmers, raising their monthly checks to NT$7,000 from NT$6,000. The DPP said the plan is in line with other civil servant salary increases and a raise given to veterans.
Tsai said the nation had missed opportunities in the past to reinvent the agricultural industry, to make it more competitive and to help it create more value-added goods that would be able to better compete in the international arena.
“People like you represent the future of the agricultural industry,” she told the group, that will focus on assisting emerging technological “agribusinesses.”
“To a certain extent, we have to make agricultural businesses more like corporations and better able to compete,” she added.
Expressing support for the DPP caucus-led proposal to raise farmers’ benefits, she said that real salaries in the agricultural sector have fallen below levels in 2000 because of a lack of investment in the industry.
The NT$1,000 increase would be a small part in helping rectify the problem, she said.
“When we have the reality that salaries have fallen at the same time that the costs of growing produce have increased, the [increase] would only be fair,” she said.
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