White water snowflakes cultivated along the habitat of pheasant-tailed jacanas for ecological restoration in Meinong Lake (美濃湖) hit the shelves of Carrefour Taiwan’s 63 wholesale stores nationwide yesterday.
The Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency has been collaborating with the Kaohsiung City Government to promote the Payment of Ecosystem Services scheme since 2021, agency official Wang Chao-hua (汪昭華) told a news conference yesterday.
While white water snowflakes are classified as a critically endangered plant species in Taiwan, pheasant-tailed jacanas are listed as a rare and valuable bird species, she said, citing the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species and the Act on Wildlife Conservation (野生動物保育法) respectively.
Photo courtesy of a Meinong Lake volunteer
Under the program, agricultural workers based in the city’s Meinong District (美濃) reserved spaces as the bird’s habitat while cultivating the plant as a cash crop at the lake, Wang said.
The number of pheasant-tailed jacanas dropped to about 50 nationwide in 2000, but through restoration efforts over the years, the number has climbed to nearly 10,000, Kaohsiung Wild Bird Society president Chuang Ching-fu (莊清富) said.
The conservation of the bird in the district started in 2017, when a small population was identified, and ecological workers Huang Shu-mei (黃淑玫) and Liu Hsiao-shen (劉孝伸) volunteered their pensions and raised funds from local residents to build an artificial habitat around the lake, Chuang said.
In 2021, the Kaohsiung Tourism Bureau helped expand the habitat, making it a foothold for conservation of pheasant-tailed jacanas, he said.
As the population grew bigger, more and more pheasant-tailed jacanas flew to nearby white water snowflake farms and built nests at the lake, Chuang said.
The society persuaded local farm workers to postpone harvesting white water snowflakes where there were nestlings, while the agency’s scheme compensated partly for the incurred financial loss, he said.
Although the financial loss cannot be fully offset by such subsidies, many farm workers continued to cooperate and some of them donated the subsidies to the association to aid conservation efforts, Chuang said.
Carrefour Taiwan Foundation chief sustainability officer Marilyn Su (蘇小真) said the company is committed to making traceable food products accessible to people at affordable prices.
The company also seeks to promote sustainability by combining agricultural products with Taiwanese lifestyles, such as Taiwanese egg pancake with white water snowflakes, she said.
In other news, Carrefour Taiwan on Monday said it has discontinued the sale of cage-reared eggs at all its stores in Taipei and aims to expand the policy to all its stores nationwide by October next year.
Carrefour Taiwan’s shift to cage-free eggs began in 2017, when large numbers of eggs containing excessive levels of the insecticide fipronil sparked food safety concerns, Su said on Monday.
It took the company eight years to increase its revenue from cage-free eggs from 4 percent of all eggs in 2018 to more than 30 percent this year, she said.
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