Aboriginal communities in Hualien County’s Fengbin Township (豐濱) are reviving their farmlands near the sea as part of the Forestry Bureau’s “Forest-Mountain-Borough-Sea” initiative, bureau officials told a news conference in Hualien yesterday.
The initiative was first proposed by Lee Kuang-chung (李光中), an associate professor at National Dong Hwa University’s College of Environmental Studies, who found the township’s Sinshe Village (新社) a perfect place for eco-agricultural experiments.
Lee’s proposal borrows from the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity and the “Global Workshop on the Satoyama Initiative” that was held by UNESCO in Paris in January 2010, which aims to promote the sustainability of biodiversity and human livelihoods.
Acting on advice from Lee, the Hualien District Agricultural Research and Extension Station, the Forestry Bureau and the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau established a platform in October last year to promote the “Forest-Mountain-Borough-Sea” initiative.
The Kebalan and Amis Dipit communities are among the village residents, with about 300 people living in the terraces between the Coastal Range and the Pacific Ocean, Lee said.
The 600-hectare terrace area is an intact water catchment area, Lee said.
Growing produce on terraces is challenging because large machines cannot be used on the narrow strips of land, bureau Conservation Division Director Hsia Jung-sheng (夏榮生) said.
Lin Yu-fei (林玉妃), 45, returned to her Kebalan community to grow rice after working at Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital for more than 20 years.
“After my mother passed away five years ago, our family farmland fell into disuse. To maintain my mother’s spirit, our family decided to restore the farm,” she said.
The family did not originally plan on growing produce because their farm’s irrigation system was ruined years ago, but a friend who works at the Hualien District Agricultural Research and Extension Station said her land was beautiful and would be good for growing organic rice, she said.
Soil and Water Conservation Bureau officials helped her to repair the irrigation pipes, she said.
Now there are “eight fools” growing rice, yellow and black beans and buckwheat in the Kebalan community, Lin said.
With the help of officials, 80-year-old Wang Ming-yuan (王明源) of the Amis Dipit community has also started to grow organic rice.
His farm has grabbed visitors’ attention because of an unusual scarecrow that is made of bamboo and recycled iron and resembles a set of percussion instruments.
The scarecrow was made by Teng Tun-fang (鄧敦方), a young woman from Taipei who has fallen in love with the area and has been helping with community work.
Asked whether the Amis Dipit community has benefited from the “Forest-Mountain-Borough-Sea” initiative, Teng said there are upsides and downsides.
The initiative brings in more resources and visitors, she said, but serving visitors can be a burden to communities, especially during summer vacations. The government should not just promote short-term tourism, but should help Aboriginal communities cultivate sustainable industries, she said.
Asked if the initiative would help farmers become financially independent, Lee said that that young people have difficulty supporting their families by selling agricultural produce and many have to leave for cities to work.
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