President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday defended the cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) as part of his government’s efforts to boost the nation’s agricultural sector and promised to devote more effort to improving the lives of farmers.
Ma, who is seeking re-election in January, met with members from 13 of 17 irrigation associations around Taiwan yesterday at a large-scale campaign event in Yunlin County as local representatives pledged their support.
With the establishment of a support group for irrigation associations, Ma’s campaign office sought to boost Ma’s support in the farming and fishing industries in central and southern Taiwan.
Photo: CNA
Ma yesterday promoted the government’s agricultural policies, including the Farming Village Revitalization Act (農村再生條例) and policies that help rice farmers with private land to rent the land to long-term professional operators, and said the signing of the ECFA with China last year also benefited local farmers.
“Agricultural policies revitalized the agricultural industry. Many underground radio stations had warned that I would sell out Taiwan if elected as the president. In the past three years, I’ve proven that what I sold was local fruit, because the ECFA helped the export of Taiwanese fruit,” he said.
Ma said thanks to the inclusion of 18 agricultural products in the “early harvest” list of goods and services under the ECFA, exports of 18 agricultural products, such as dragon fruit and grouper fish, grew 2.6 times from last year, to NT$69 million (US$ 2.36 million).
“The ECFA helped bring more business opportunities for people and increased Taiwan’s international competitiveness,” 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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