Agricultural businesses are increasingly using the Internet to market farm produce, with garlic farmers in Yunlin County tapping into the vast purchasing power of online communities to cut out intermediaries and sell produce directly to customers.
Farmers in Yunlin said that the nation reaped a bumper harvest of garlic last year, but that prices in garlic-producing regions were down to below NT$10 per jin (600g) at the lowest points due to overproduction.
Some farmers were able to sell all of their produce using online marketing while others were still waiting for wholesalers to purchase crops, farmers said.
Farmer Lin Chun-fu (林俊甫) said he sold out of thousands of kilograms of garlic by promoting his produce on Facebook, adding that Internet marketing is conducive to reducing farmers’ over-reliance on wholesalers.
Garlic farmer Wang Kuei-hsien (王貴先) said he set up an online shop that sells a combination of products at better prices than those offered by wholesale buyers, and that online sales account for up to 40 percent of his harvested crops.
However, farmer Cheng Ting-yuan (鄭丁元) said that extensive use of Internet marketing of agricultural products throughout the nation is unlikely to happen soon, because only young, tech-savvy farmers are familiar with e-commerce, while most older farmers do not even how to use a computer.
A farmer in his 60s surnamed Wu (吳) in Taichung City’s Dongshih Township (東勢) said that he could foresee the profitability of Internet marketing, but added that there are few resources in the countryside to boost farmers’ digital literacy, despite his willingness to learn. He said his sales still depend on wholesalers.
Yunlin County Agriculture Department Director-General Chang Shih-chung (張世忠) said that farmers could learn marketing strategies through the county government’s annual agriculture training program.
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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