The 21st century is a maritime era, and nations around the globe are rushing to expand their maritime infrastructure and development, while Taiwan is content that the legislature recently approved the establishment of a new agency for marine conservation. These new agencies are created in order to satisfy some individuals’ needs for official positions or to further their own careers. They are the stepping-stones for a few people’s personal advancement, but they do not achieve what they were founded to do.
The number of redundant personnel keeps increasing, but old problems remain unsolved. For instance, the government set up the Food and Drug Administration to deal with a never-ending series of food safety problems, but the problems got worse, so the Food Safety Office was established. Unfortunately, food safety problems have remained, taxpayers’ money is wasted and public complaints have only increased.
The new agency for marine conservation and the Fisheries Agency are two other examples: They fall under different agencies and have many overlapping functions that are difficult to integrate.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) knows very well how important picking the right department leadership is to maintaining efficiency and boosting morale, which is why some of his administration’s officials were selected from outside the government, rather than chosen behind closed doors by Ko or appointed as a reward for past services.
Although this approach sparked some controversy, it is an innovation that has been commended by Taipei residents, who hold high hopes for Ko and his staff.
When faced with problems, the central government routinely uses insufficient manpower or money as an excuse to create new agencies, neglecting the root of a problem while bureaucracy gets increasingly bloated.
Taiwan is surrounded by water and gifted with abundant fishery resources that unfortunately have not been exploited. The authorities have ignored changes in the global fishing industry and, as a consequence, Taiwan’s fishing industry has declined and its fishing villages are economically depressed.
The main problem lies in the choice of officials to lead the Fisheries Agency, who are almost always chosen from a small clique of people. The results of this inbreeding are declining leadership that is out of touch with the public and policies that are not innovative.
The agency is often criticized by global conservation organizations for not practicing what it preaches. Fisheries research usually just copies Japanese studies and is hardly innovative. Too much emphasis is placed on the financial rewards of intellectual property rights and technology transfer, while little attention is paid to the urgent needs of fishermen, such as developing new fishing grounds, addressing high mortality rates among farmed fish, improving supplies of eel fry, reversing a shortage of workers and increasing the added-value of fishery products. Those needs are not addressed quickly enough. The only resource not in short supply are fishermen’s complaints.
Whether the pan-blue or the pan-green camp is in power, authorities regard fisheries as an accessory to agriculture. Their only aim is to avoid big mistakes. There is little concern for the long-standing monopoly over administrative resources by a few factions who use public resources for their own private purposes. How can anyone expect a promising future for Taiwanese fishermen? In recent years, Taiwan’s offshore fishery resources have clearly been depleted, and most of the fish sold in fishing harbors are frequently a mixture of just-caught and imported fish.
Conservation organizations, academics and experts keep warning that Taiwan is on the verge of becoming an island without fish. The nation’s aquaculture industry has nothing to show — apart from groupers — and its technological development of offshore aquaculture lags far behind that of advanced nations.
Taiwanese commercial fishing has moved from among the best in the world to second-class or worse, but that does not seem to worry those in charge of the industry.
Talent is the key to bringing about real changes. Taiwan’s commercial fishing industry is in need of a leader who is a visionary and capable of implementing policy, like Ko. Increasing the number or levels of agencies is not the answer.
Lee Wu-chung is a professor of agricultural economics and a former director of the Yunlin County Department of Agriculture.
Translated by Ethan Zhan
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