If the Council of Agriculture (COA) fails to develop a sophisticated program for utlilizing fallow land, its well-intentioned policy could end up destroying Taiwan’s agricultural sector, opposition legislators said yesterday.
“The coucil’s policy to utilize fallow land across the country, which aims to rejuvenate the agricultural sector, is commendable, but is undermined by its lack of policy deliberation,” Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Pan Men-an (潘孟安) told a press conference.
Taiwan began to implement fallow agricultural policies after its accession to the WTO in 2002. Such policies led to a decline in the price of agricultural production due to increased agricultural imports, and did not lead to the usage of fallow land until recently, when the global food crisis occurred, he said.
However, the council is failing to control production and supply under its current policy, which leaves 60 percent of activated fallow land for local governments to decide which crops to grow and does not regulate the plantation of import substitution crops, such as flint corns, sugarcanes, soybeans and wheat, the lawmaker said.
The council’s planning and seasonal adjustments would be crucial for the farmers, otherwise the farmers could be exploited by middlemen or farmers in various regions could cultivate the same crops, which would result in lower prices, he added.
DPP Legislator Huang Wei-cher (黃偉哲) said the central government would be in a better position to monitor and control production and supply than local governments.
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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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching