In an attempt to quell the escalating Dapu Borough (大埔) farmland expropriation controversy Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) called a press conference with Miaoli County Commissioner Liu Cheng-hung (劉政鴻), Minister of Agriculture Chen Wu-hsiung (陳武雄) and Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) on Thursday.
During the conference, Wu declined to promise that more agricultural areas would not be seized for future development projects, but he did say that food security is an area of national strategic importance.
While Wu stopped short of addressing Taiwan’s food security from a strategic perspective, he has pointed out a crucial issue — one that has raised grave concern around the globe.
Food security is an issue that needs to be tackled on a strategic level, but is often overlooked by government officials preoccupied with economic growth in the industrial sector.
Given its importance, what is the government’s food security strategy?
An examination of the agriculture white paper issued by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) during the 2008 presidential campaign shows the administration’s strategy is far from comprehensive
The white paper says: “[The campaign’s] agricultural development goals are to develop healthy, efficient and sustainable agriculture for the people,” with an aim to raise production efficiency, focus on food safety and achieve co-existence with the environment.
Most of the white paper is dedicated to either pledges to improve farmers’ living standards or criticism of the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) agriculture policy.
The annual administrative guidelines drawn up by the Executive Yuan since the Ma administration took office in 2008 do mention the idea of maintaining food security, but only briefly.
The Executive Yuan says in its guidelines that it will “revive fallow farmland and adjust the production and sale structure of rice in a bid to ensure food security.”
Unfortunately, that is where all mention of food security ends.
There are not even independent sections outlining the government’s food security strategy in the Executive Yuan’s annual administrative goals.
This lack of a comprehensive strategy is alarming because, statistically speaking, Taiwan is over-reliant on imported food.
The Agriculture and Food Agency’s latest data show that domestic production of crops, including rice, wheat and corn, in 2007 totaled 1.18 million tonnes of Taiwan’s total consumption of 7.6 million tonnes of these crops.
A similar situation is found in the domestic production and supply of crops like potatoes, sweet potatoes and others, with imports of these root vegetables supplying up about 95 percent of domestic needs.
Wu said during a meeting with concerned academics and farmers representatives on Tuesday that being self-sufficient in food supply should be made a national strategy.
Although he made the remark to salvage the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government’s image in the wake of the Dapu farmland seizure controversy, hopefully the idea of developing a comprehensive strategic food security policy will become more than just words.
Maybe it’s time for the government to propose a white paper detailing its food security policy that addresses the strategic importance of this issue instead of just trying to score political points.
US aerospace company Boeing Co has in recent years been involved in numerous safety incidents, including crashes of its 737 Max airliners, which have caused widespread concern about the company’s safety record. It has recently come to light that titanium jet engine parts used by Boeing and its European competitor Airbus SE were sold with falsified documentation. The source of the titanium used in these parts has been traced back to an unknown Chinese company. It is clear that China is trying to sneak questionable titanium materials into the supply chain and use any ensuing problems as an opportunity to
It’s not every month that the US Department of State sends two deputy assistant secretary-level officials to Taiwan, together. Its rarer still that such senior State Department policy officers, once on the ground in Taipei, make a point of huddling with fellow diplomats from “like-minded” NATO, ANZUS and Japanese governments to coordinate their multilateral Taiwan policies. The State Department issued a press release on June 22 admitting that the two American “representatives” had “hosted consultations in Taipei” with their counterparts from the “Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The consultations were blandly dubbed the “US-Taiwan Working Group on International Organizations.” The State
The Chinese Supreme People’s Court and other government agencies released new legal guidelines criminalizing “Taiwan independence diehard separatists.” While mostly symbolic — the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never had jurisdiction over Taiwan — Tamkang University Graduate Institute of China Studies associate professor Chang Wu-ueh (張五岳), an expert on cross-strait relations, said: “They aim to explain domestically how they are countering ‘Taiwan independence,’ they aim to declare internationally their claimed jurisdiction over Taiwan and they aim to deter Taiwanese.” Analysts do not know for sure why Beijing is propagating these guidelines now. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), deciphering the
Many local news media last week reported that COVID-19 is back, citing doctors’ observations and the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) statistics. The CDC said that cases would peak this month and urged people to take preventive measures. Although COVID-19 has never been eliminated, it has become more manageable, and restrictions were dropped, enabling people to return to their normal way of life due to decreasing hospitalizations and deaths. In Taiwan, mandatory reporting of confirmed cases and home isolation ended in March last year, while the mask mandate at hospitals and healthcare facilities stopped in May. However, the CDC last week said the number