The agricultural sector should be excluded from the service trade agreement with China and manufacturers in the free economic pilot zones should be required to use domestic material exclusively to save the sector from “disastrous annihilation,” academics said yesterday.
“We are not opposed to free trade, but we do not support a system of completely free trade because social fairness and safeguarding the disadvantaged should always go before economic development,” Kainan University professor Wu Ming-ming (吳明敏) told a press conference.
The seven academics at the conference specialize in different areas, including agricultural economics, agribusiness and sociology, but they all said they were concerned about the government’s “excessive liberalization” of the nation’s agricultural industry as it seeks greater integration into the global free-trade system.
If the government fails to establish any protection mechanisms for the agricultural sector, which has an annual output value of more than NT$470 billion (US$15.6 billion), eventually as much as one-third of the sector’s value, or about NT$170 billion, could be lost, National Chung Hsing University economist Chen Chi-chung (陳吉仲) said.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has highlighted Taiwan’s trade relations with China as a catalyst for the pursuit of further global economic integration. The service trade pact and the free economic pilot zones are aimed at further deregulation and an investment-free environment to attract foreign investment.
However, the primary threat still comes from China, which could take advantage of the pact, which places almost no limitation on cheaper Chinese agricultural products, Chen said.
Chen said Japan and South Korea fiercely protect their local agricultural sectors.
Seoul rejected rice exports to the US in its free-trade agreement negotiations with Washington and Tokyo has also been determined to safeguard its agricultural sector during its negotiations for access to the nascent US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Chen said.
While farm produce processing companies and traders would benefit from the current arrangement, farmers would lose out, the academics said.
“After Taiwan joined the WTO, it prohibited imports of more than 800 Chinese agricultural products, but completely opened its market to other countries because the then-Democratic Progressive Party [DPP) administration recognized the threats,” National Taiwan University Department of Agricultural Economics chairman Roger Woo (吳榮杰) said.
Given the proximity of the two countries and the similar products, Chinese agriculture will more than likely replace domestic products, which are more expensive, the economist added.
“Now is not the best time to liberalize Taiwan’s agricultural sector, where the food self-sufficiency rate is a dismal 32 percent. Every country should approach trade negotiations with its own current status in mind and with a well-calculated strategy that could protect its own,” said Frida Tsai (蔡培慧), an assistant professor at Shih Hsin University’s Graduate Institute for Social Transformation Studies.
The agricultural sector is strategically significant not only because of its economic output, Tsai said, “but more importantly, it is also related to employment as well as having a social and cultural impact.”
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods