At least 15,000 hectares of farmland should be used for organic farming by 2020, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) told a forum yesterday, while an academic called for more research on organic farming methods.
The forum on organic agriculture at National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taipei was hosted by the Youngsun Culture and Education Foundation, which was founded by former premier Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃).
The Organic Agriculture Promotion Act (有機農業促進法), which was promulgated on May 30 and is to come into effect a year later, would allow the government to systematically promote organic farming and solve the problems of farmland pollution and a lack of agricultural land, Tsai said in her opening speech.
The government hopes to increase the amount of farmland for organic or environmentally friendly farming methods from about 10,000 hectares to 15,000 hectares by 2020, Tsai said, expressing the hope that organic farming would become the mainstream agricultural method.
Taiwanese organic products now cannot be exported, because they have not received organic recognition from other nations, Council of Agriculture Minister Lin Tsung-hsien (林聰賢) said, adding that the act would allow farmers to apply for organic certification to overseas sales.
Foreign nations that want to import Taiwanese organic products would also be required to sign an agreement to establish a bilateral organic equivalency recognition mechanism, which would help reduce the nation’s trade barriers and expand its international space, Lin said.
As product processing is a problem for many organic farmers who produce a limited amount of widely diversified produce, the council is deliberating with the Ministry of Health and Welfare to see if small-scale agricultural product processing could be regulated by the council, instead of by the ministry, whose food safety regulations often focus on large factories, Lin added.
NTU Department of Agronomy professor Warren Kuo (郭華仁) told the forum that the council should allocate more funding to research organic farming techniques, which are only granted about 1.2 percent of its total research budget.
To promote sustainable agricultural development, the nation should know more about agricultural ecology and microorganisms in soil, while diversifying marketing channels for organic products, Kuo said.
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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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