e Pingtung County Council yesterday, asking the council to let top agriculture authorities know about their plight and provide help. They told Pingtung County Council Speaker Zhou Dian-lun that recent publicity about contaminated coconuts imported from Thailand has resulted in less demand for domestic coconuts, driving prices so low that it is no longer worth hiring workers to harvest the nuts.
The coconut growers complained that prices of locally produced coconuts have already been depressed in recent years because of competition from imports, and that the incident of contaminated coconuts from Thailand has aggravated their plight even further.
"Although the government promised to subsidize domestic coconut farmers when it opened the Taiwanese market to imported coconuts after Taiwan joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2002, we have received nothing," they said.
"The chief of the Council of Agriculture, Su Jia-quan, has never done any promotion for coconut farmers. He has promoted sales of cabbages and oranges but has ignored us," they added.
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