Academics, experts, Aborigines and farmers from Taiwan and eight other nations yesterday signed the Taiwan Declaration in Taipei, which seeks to protect Aboriginal cultures and rejects genetically modified (GM) crops.
Climate change has had an adverse effect on Aborigines’ culture and livelihood around the world, because they can no longer grow their traditional crops, said Lin Yih-ren (林益仁), chair of the Graduate Institute of Humanities in Medicine at Taipei Medical University.
The declaration, signed on the first day of a two-day inaugural meeting of the International Network of Indigenous Ecological Farmers (INIEF) at the university, said that to prevent possible environmental harm that could be caused by GM crops, Aborigines will not plant such crops, but seek the help of farmers and international seed banks to find suitable replacements to be grown on their land.
It also calls for support from governments and international organizations for the INIEF’s efforts to tackle challenges facing Aborigines, and welcomes Aborigines, farmers’ groups and other organizations to join the network.
The participants urged government leaders, including president-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), who is to take office on May 20, to introduce progressive policies for Aborigines and protect their ecosystem.
Several participants of yesterday’s meeting have taken part in a series of workshops held in four Aboriginal communities around Taiwan since March 11 and exchanged their experiences with farming and environmental protection issues.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift