The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus yesterday asked the Council of Agriculture (COA) to ease fishery compensation rules to include fish farms operating without full licenses, while the council said that only fully licenced farms could be financially compensated.
Cold weather last month dealt a heavy blow to the aquaculture sector, which suffered losses of NT$3.25 billion (US$96.73 million), the highest in the nation’s history, while the agricultural losses excluding the fishery sector reached NT$967.88 million, the COA said.
The council has been lobbied to relax compensation regulations for partially licensed farmers, as many have engaged in actual farming without having acquired all fish-farming related documents — an aquaculture certificate, a farming registration certificate and a water rights certificate — required for cash compensation.
Following a meeting between DPP lawmakers and Premier Simon Chang (張善政) on Wednesday, the agency eased some of the regulations, including extending the deadline for compensation applications and lowering the interest rates of relief loans, but it continued to bar partially licensed farmers from the scheme at yesterday’s meeting with the DPP caucus at the Legislative Yuan.
DPP Legislator Wang Ding-yu (王定宇) said the council should not discriminate against a particular group of disaster victims, because many farmers could not acquire the licenses even if they wanted to, as many are tenant farmers and could not persuade landlords to help them get licensed.
“About 20 percent of farmers in Tainan will not be eligible for the cash grant. The government did financially compensate farmers without full licenses when Typhoon Morakot [hit in 2009], and it should do the same this time. The government should tap the secondary reserve fund to help farmers fare through the disaster, but the fund is instead used to subsidize energy-saving equipment. It is ridiculous,” Wang said.
COA Deputy Minister Chen Wen-te (陳文德) said that compensation issued to partially licensed farmers after Morakot was sourced from private donations instead of public funds, and offering those farmers low interest rate loans is what the COA could do most for the latest disaster.
DPP Legislator Su Chih-feng (蘇治芬) questioned the helpfulness of the loans, saying many farmers are already deeply in debt due to repeated disasters caused by extreme weather, and their credit score would prevent them from securing a loan, no matter how low interest rates are.
Meanwhile, DPP Legislator Chuang Jui-hsiung (莊瑞雄) said more agricultural losses would begin to emerge as fruit trees begin to yield fruit, and called on the agency to establish a special compensation scheme for late occurring losses.
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