The price of bananas has fallen through the floor. In response to farmers’ complaints, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) responded: “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Despite crisscrossing Taiwan for his election campaign, Ma obviously hasn’t paid attention to what the common person thinks, or perhaps he doesn’t care. If he did, how could he be so insensitive?
The question is a sign that Ma knows nothing about anything. To him, governing means finding out what’s going on by reading about it in the newspaper: the seriousness of the Typhoon Morakot disaster, the nomination of a “dinosaur” judge for a seat on the Council of Grand Justices and the investigation into the wrongful execution of Chiang Kuo-ching (江國慶).
And when victims of the Morakot disaster complained that they hadn’t had a chance to talk to the president, his answer was: “I’m here now, aren’t I?”
Banana prices have been depressed for some time, as have banana sales. In addition to farmers informing the government of this situation through agricultural channels, legislators have called on the Council of Agriculture to handle the situation, and county commissioners, mayors, companies and other organizations have helped sell bananas out of their concern over the plight of banana farmers. Ma alone seems to have missed that something is wrong.
China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Deputy Chairman Zheng Lizhong (鄭立中) even traveled to southern Taiwan to learn about the problems last month. And when Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) visited China earlier this month, he asked Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Chairman Wang Yi (王毅) to help sell bananas and Wang agreed. Beijing has known about these problems for some time, yet Taiwan’s own president, sitting in Taipei, knows nothing. Either Ma is plain dumb or the Cabinet is keeping him in the dark.
Even if the government knew about the problem, was it able to do anything about it? With banana surpluses in the past, the government used to deal with the problem itself by getting the military and schools to help out. When the current administration has a problem, however, it calls on China. When sales of oranges dropped, oranges were shipped to China, and because nuclear power is considered dangerous, the government wants to ship nuclear waste to China.
To Ma, China is the cure-all: When there’s a problem, China will fix it. It has reached the point where the government has become addicted to China and lost the capability to solve any problems on its own.
However, the sale of agricultural products to China has been exposed as a fraud. Instead, China sells large volumes of its agricultural products to Taiwan. Furthermore, China is experiencing its own banana surplus. Hainan Province alone has tens of thousands of tonnes of unsold bananas, so if the TAO buys Taiwanese bananas, it is part of its unification strategy.
The sale of agricultural products is a long-term issue. If climate change and a lack of information among farmers cause overproduction or shortages, and if wholesalers push losses onto farmers, the farmers will experience massive losses while consumer prices remain unchanged. With the distribution chain out of balance, the only ones making any money are the middlemen. The council has not been able to establish a warning system or a mechanism to maintain orderly distribution. When the system becomes imbalanced, there is no system to stabilize prices and minimize farmers’ losses. This is the responsibility of the Cabinet, which has long been shirking its duties.
The banana surplus exposes the same old problem: Ma’s incompetence when it comes to grasping domestic problems and the government’s feebleness in handling them. These problems surfaced with the Morakot disaster in August 2008, Ma’s first year in power. The government often blames its low approval ratings on insufficient information about its policies. The banana farmers’ problems show that it is not a matter of information, but a matter of incapability.
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