More than 400 Indonesians are to take part in a training and work program next month in Taiwan in a bid to ease the nation’s shortage of agricultural workers, Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Chi-chung (陳吉仲) said on Friday.
Speaking at a legislative hearing, Chen said that about 450 young Indonesians are to arrive in Taiwan next month and learn agricultural skills at local agricultural research and extension stations for two to four weeks.
They would then translate their knowledge into practice on farms nationwide, Chen said, without specifying how long they would work.
The program was modeled after an apprentice system in Japan that allows local companies to hire skilled workers from developing economies to overcome labor shortages, Chen said.
That program has been mutually beneficial for participant countries, as it has helped Japan ease labor shortages while the apprentices learn skills that they can take home and use to develop their own nations, he said.
Other government agencies are also planning measures to address the nation’s shortage of agricultural labor, Chen said.
The Ministry of Labor on Jan. 30 approved the employment of foreign workers in dairy farming and at agriculture exhibitions. The policy is to take effect in July at the earliest.
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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