A senior agriculture official in Lithuania has asked Taipei to speed up import permissions for agricultural products from the Baltic nation, as it could benefit from accessing the Taiwanese market amid economic sanctions from China.
Antanas Venckus, head of the Lithuanian Ministry of Agriculture’s International Affairs and Export Promotion Department, made the comments in an interview with the Central News Agency.
Taiwan is a potential market for Lithuania’s agricultural and food products, Venckus said.
Photo: Yang Cheng-yu, Taipei Times
As sanctions from Beijing are preventing a large number of Lithuanian companies from entering the Chinese market, Taiwanese authorities are doing their best to help the companies to redirect their agricultural shipments to Taiwan, he said.
“That’s a good move — and, of course, we appreciate that very much,” he said.
However, many of the companies are still waiting for permissions and licenses from Taiwan, Venckus added.
“We call for urgent action from the Taiwanese side to help us to make these exports eligible,” he said. “Now the ball is on the Taiwanese side and we are waiting for these actions to make these exports possible.”
Lithuania has faced increased political and economic pressure from China after it last month allowed Taiwan to open a representative office in the nation’s capital, Vilnius, with “Taiwanese” in the office’s official name.
The official names of Taiwan’s representative offices in other European countries typically use “Taipei” instead of “Taiwan” or “Taiwanese.”
China’s retaliatory actions have included recalling its ambassador to Lithuania and expelling Lithuania’s ambassador to China, as well as suspending direct freight train services to the Baltic nation and banning Lithuanian products from entering the Chinese market.
Lithuanian firms are worried about the sanctions, Venckus said.
“The biggest problem is that Lithuania disappeared from the customs system [of China] as a country of origin,” he said.
Although the Chinese said that it was a “technical problem,” everyone knows that Beijing is deliberately banning Lithuanian imports, Venckus added.
To make things worse for Lithuania, Chinese authorities are pressuring international companies to stop working with their Lithuanian counterparts.
“They are saying, if you are going to continue to cooperate with Lithuanian companies and buy components from them, we will not buy your goods — and this is a huge problem,” he said.
It was not Lithuania’s intention to negatively impact its relations with China, he said.
“Normally, we do not mix politics with the economy, but we understand that in authoritarian countries, everything is mixed together and it’s a pity that businesspeople are paying quite a high price,” he added.
No one is blaming the government, as far as he knows, as businesspeople knew that these problems would surface sooner or later, Venckus said.
“This is also a message for all the other countries in the European Union. [This is] what’s going to happen or what might happen, you know, if you are not playing according to the rules of the Chinese government, and if you defend your interests, which are based on your values,” he said.
Fortunately, other EU countries, the US and Taiwan are supporting Lithuania, he added.
Lithuania plans to send a business delegation to Taiwan headed by its agriculture minister sometime next year to enhance trade relations, he 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:
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
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
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