Greater Tainan residents opposed to a plan by the local subsidiary of Rotam Global Agrosciences, a Hong Kong-based agrochemical company, to construct a new plant in Sinhua District (新化) are scheduled to begin an indefinite sit-in in front of Wu-te Temple (武德殿) in the district tonight.
Initiated by the Tua-Bak-Kang Green Environment Front (大目降綠色環境陣線), a civic group founded by people who live in the Sinhua area, sit-ins are to be staged every weekend from 7am to 6pm.
The sit-in is the latest effort by Sinhua residents who protested outside the company’s groundbreaking ceremony for the project on April 1 and urged a halt to construction until public hearings can be held to clarify their concerns.
Photo: Wu Chun-feng, Taipei Times
The residents are worried that the materials used by the company to manufacture its products, which range from insecticides and herbicides to other crop protection products, could pose a threat to the local environment and to their health.
The company said in a statement yesterday that it plans to invest NT$2.5 billion (US$81.65 million) in the plant, which will focus on research, development and material mixing, not manufacturing, and is expected to create 800 jobs.
It dismissed allegations that it made a backroom deal with the government so that it could build in the middle of farmland rather than in the city’s Yongkang Industrial Park so that it could proceed without going through an environmental impact assessment (EIA).
“Rotam is a legitimate manufacturer of crop protection products and we have filed for a construction permit for the planned plant in accordance with the law,” the company said in the statement.
It also said it was exempt from producing an EIA report because the planned plant is not considered a chemical factory.
The recent wave of protests against the project were the result of a lack of communication, Rotam said, adding that an “unsubstantiated smear campaign” would only aggravate social divisions.
However, Greater Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) said Rotam had yet to apply for a factory permit with the city government and he urged the company to halt construction until all concerns were resolved.
“A construction permit is different from a factory permit,” Lai said.
The city government would adopt the strictest standards in assessing companies that plan to invest in the city and would never do anything at that would harm the environment or residents’ health, the mayor said.
Meanwhile, Miaoli County Commissioner Liu Cheng-hung (劉政鴻) said the plan to construct a bypass road for Provincial Highway No. 13 was unlikely to affect the endangered leopard cats in the county.
Liu’s remarks came one day after the EIA general assembly decided to return the plan to an EIA specialists’ meeting for further review, saying the road — which would run from Tongluo Township (銅鑼) to the Sanyi Interchange of the Sun Yat-sen Freeway (Freeway No. 1) and cut through a very important habitat for the leopard cats — further endangering the animals.
“The central government only agreed to allocate NT$5.2 billion for the project after several county commissioners and lawmakers had fought very hard for it for the past decade… I do not know how many decades Sanyi (三義) residents are going to have to suffer traffic congestion in the area,” Liu 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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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