Farmers and rural advocacy groups continued their campaign yesterday against water rationing plans, as the government expands its sanctions on irrigation water amid a nationwide drought.
Starting today, water sanctions are to be imposed on irrigation zones in Greater Taoyuan, Greater Tainan and Hsinchu and Chiayi counties, following water rationing in Miaoli County and Greater Taichung since late last month.
The recent series of sanctions are to be the second-largest in the nation’s history, with more than 40,000 hectares of fields affected.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
Led by the Taiwan Rural Front, dozens of farmers rallied in front of the Executive Yuan in Taipei yesterday to decry what they said was an unequal distribution of water resources for industrial and agricultural use, adding that the sanctions “infringe on the integrity and rights of farmers.”
National Chengchi University professor Hsu Hsih-jung (徐世榮) said that according to the regulations established by the Water Resources Agency, industrial as well as non-industrial sectors should shoulder water sanctions together.
“In order to help industrial giants evade a 5 percent sanction in water usage, the government chose to decrease irrigation water for farmers by 100 percent,” Hsu said, adding that such policies only serve to “destroy agriculture.”
The activists said that institutionalized regulations should be established for the distribution of water resources in times of drought, instead of making “black box decisions that fail to account for the opinions of affected farmers.”
Liu Cheng-yu (劉政雨), 28, who runs a large farm on rented land in Hsinchu County, said the sanctions could cost his farm more than NT$10 million (US$314,000) in revenue this season.
He said that the sanctions “destroyed” the hard work of farmers and ran contrary to recent policies that have encouraged young farmers like himself to return to the countryside to work.
Taiwan Rural Front researcher Chen Ping-hsuan (陳平軒) said the group demands an official response from Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Bao-ji (陳保基) within a week.
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
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
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