The introduction of the Satoyama Initiative to Kaohsiung’s Meinong District (美濃) has seen incredible success and proved that a win-win situation is achievable in terms of agricultural production while protecting the environment, Kaohsiung Bureau of Agriculture officials said.
“Satoyama” is a Japanese term applied to a border zone or area between mountain foothills and arable flat land and can be defined as an entire landscape used for agriculture, containing a mosaic of mixed forests, rice paddy fields, dry rice fields, grasslands and various bodies of water.
Meinong has long been a key agricultural production area in the region, while offering Kaohsiung residents the beautiful scenery of rural villages, farmland and rivers.
Photo: Chen Wen-chan, Taipei Times
Bureau officials said Meinong residents voted to implement the Satoyama Iniative and that the bureau is conducting a biodiversity inspection in the Meinong area — the first of its kind in the nation.
Officials said the inspection is expected to take six to 12 months to complete, adding that it is concentrating its efforts on the district’s rice paddies, wild lotus and mixed grains.
Although only two months into the general inspection, bureau officials said they have already discovered the presence of painted snipe, a creature listed as a class-two protected species, adding that the rice paddies are also home to the rarely seen Onychothemis testacea tonkinensis, a species of dragonfly that usually makes its home midstream or downstream in clean rivers.
Officials said they also found another class-two protected species, the black-winged kite, and a class-three protected species, the Oriental pratincole, in the cornfields, with the former hunting Arvicolinae for food and the latter feeding off insects.
Of note is the change in focus of the inspection area, which is usually centered on woodlands, the bureau said, adding that most of the newly discovered animals had appeared in fields, which helps to analyze in greater detail types of produce grown and fields that adopt organic farming.
There is evidence to suggest that eco-friendly farming is safest, both for the produce grown and for the ecology, the bureau said, adding that it has contributed to creating environmentally friendly farming.
“The bureau plans to produce data on the habitats of animals in the changing landscape around Meinong’s farms,” bureau official Lin Chih-hsien (林志嫺) said.
The bureau also plans to publish a book examining how the district has successfully combined ecological conservation with agricultural activity, Lin added.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS