The Council of Agriculture (COA) yesterday reiterated its commitment to preventing Chinese garlic from entering Taiwan through a third location, particularly countries in Southeast Asia.
As garlic is one of the 830 items on a list of banned Chinese products, the council said the government was doing everything possible to avoid shipments of Chinese garlic from entering Taiwan via a third country.
The council’s Agriculture and Food Agency notified local importers in a mid-November meeting that strict measures would be adopted to screen for Chinese garlic.
PHOTO: CNA
Importers are required to attach documents — including transport contracts, customs clearance reports and government papers — to verify the origins of their imported goods, as well as documents to identify the producers, producing venues and the size of plantation areas, the council said.
Imported garlic will be sent to Taiwan’s overseas office for examination if it is hard to identify its place of production, it said.
The COA said it also had suggested the Bureau of Foreign Trade ban garlic imports from Vietnam because large amounts of Chinese garlic are shipped from there to Taiwan.
The council’s statement came after hundreds of garlic farmers from Yunlin County staged a protest in front of the county government headquarters on Monday.
The farmers dumped boxes of China-produced garlic that were shipped to Taiwan via Vietnam to protest against what they said was the government’s lack of concern for farmers’ livelihoods.
Some of the protesting farmers said that Vietnam couldn’t cultivate enough garlic to meet its own demand, not to mention the possibility of exporting it.
If Chinese garlic continues to enter Taiwan from Vietnam, it would deal a heavy blow to locally produced garlic, which is set to hit the domestic market one month later, a chief delegate of a local farmers’ association said.
Garlic is one of the major agricultural products in central and southern Taiwan, with 5,400 hectares of farmland in the nation devoted to its cultivation.
Garlic production in Taiwan is valued at about NT$2.1 billion (US$66.03 million) annually, the COA said.
Garlic grown in Yunlin County accounts for 85 percent of the country’s production.
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