Food and Fertilizer Technology Center - News

As we enter the year of the Ox, we are pinning our hopes that 2021 will terminate all the troubles that 2020 has brought to our lives. Even if we are still in the middle of this pandemic, it is our wish that we can overcome our obstacles and that our businesses and livelihood will expand and flourish all-year round. This year, FFTC has 11 projects in the pipeline. The activities in the projects include nine workshops, three networks and one seminar for our 50th Anniversary Event (please refer to the link). Because the ongoing pandemic cannot allow us to hold face-to-face meetings, all of our projects would still be done online with seven of these having onsite counterparts in our home base in Taiwan. Also including in our list of activities are the continuation of our Agricultural Policy Platform (now on its 9th year), our project on Enhancing International Collaboration for Tropical Fruit Value Chain for Global Markets (now on its 4th year) and our Proficiency Testing of Soil/Plant Analysis (now on its 4th year). We would also like to announce an addition to our growing FFTC family as we welcome Mr. Lee Kyong Won, our new Korean Agricultural Economist, from the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation.  Mr. Lee will start his work in the Center this March. Undoubtedly, this will be a busy year for us in FFTC. But we are positive that given the usual full support of our partners and stakeholders, we will surmount the odds and come up with even higher quality outputs that are aligned with our Strategic Action Plan for 2021-2024. And with your constructive feedback and suggestions, we know that we can face the year’s challenges head on. Wishing you peace, joy, good health and prosperity in the New Year! SU-SAN CHANG, Ph.D. Director

The Center’s Executive Board recently approved 11 projects for 2021. The activities in the projects include nine workshops, three networks and one seminar for our 50th Anniversary Event. Because the ongoing pandemic cannot allow us to hold face-to-face meetings, all of our projects would still be done online with seven of these having onsite counterparts in our home base in Taipei. Also including in our list of activities are the continuation of our Agricultural Policy Platform (now on its 9th year), our project on Enhancing International Collaboration for Tropical Fruit Value Chain for Global Markets (now on its 4th year) and our Proficiency Testing of Soil/Plant Analysis (now on its 4th year). Below is the Center’s Projects for 2021 which will be updated on this site from time to time. PDF file download link: http://bit.ly/3oVLqZW

The establishment of the FFTC Agricultural Policy (FFTC-AP) Platform in 2013 is directed toward collecting and disseminating the latest information on agricultural policies from various countries in the Asian and Pacific region, including Australia, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, etc. The information sources include invited and submitted analytic and research papers by agricultural professionals and policy experts mainly in Asia, as well as the latest news from academic and country reports. The main objective of the FFTC-AP Platform is to establish a database of national agricultural policies for sharing and exchanging agricultural policy information across different countries. To date, more than a thousand articles have been published in the Platform under 30 categories. The categories include topics such as Food security and safety, Overview of agricultural policy, Production policy, Smart agriculture, Farmers' welfare and retirement system, Agricultural human resources development, Agricultural science policies and technology development, Agricultural marketing policy, Agricultural e-commerce, Trade liberalization countermeasures, Import regulation and quarantine, Agricultural circular economy, Eco-friendly agriculture (satoyama and satoumi), and Rural development, etc. There are two ways to publish your papers on FFTC-AP Platform (the first one is preferred): 1. Submit manuscripts to contracted partners (please click here for their contact information). 2. Submit manuscripts directly to FFTC. All the manuscripts will be under paper review, which is coordinated by FFTC-AP contracted partners and the FFTC-AP management team. The review process will be normally completed within 14 working days. The authors should then revise their articles, according to reviewers’ comments, and send back to the original contact channel. Once the papers are accepted and published on the FFTC-AP website, certain amount of remuneration will be paid to the author(s). For more information on paper submission, please contact Ms. Natalie Lu via natalielupy@fftc.org.tw We warmly welcome you to submit agricultural policy related papers (at least 1,500 words) to us. Join us and be part of our team! For more information, please visit FFTC-AP website.

  FFTC warmly welcomes Korean agricultural policy specialist Mr. Lee Kyong Won as the latest addition to the Center’s growing family. As the new agricultural policy specialist, Mr. Lee will be in charge of the FFTC-Agricultural Policy Platform, which is now on its 9th year. The FFTC-AP collects and disseminates agricultural policy papers and information on agricultural technologies and shares these to stakeholders around the world who are interested in agricultural development and agricultural policy in the Asian Pacific region. Mr. Lee is also going to help in the organization of some of FFTC’s workshops and events including the Center’s 50th anniversary symposium. He will also be the point person in FFTC’s projects and partnerships with representatives of Korea’s agricultural organizations and agencies. A graduate of agricultural economics from Korea University, Mr. Lee Kyong Won has worked for 30 years in Korea’s National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (NACF), dealing mostly with agricultural economy and other fields of policy research. Major subjects involved are policies/strategies on distribution of agricultural products (especially rice), the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) multilateral negotiations of the World Trade Organization (WTO), farm household income, etc. Before he became a researcher of NACF’s Agricultural Policy Research Team, Mr. Lee was also the Director of Management Research Department of the Nong Hyup Economic Research Institute.Agricultural policy specialist Mr. Lee Kyong Won

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect practically all aspects of our lives, we at FFTC have been constantly adjusting the conduct of our projects and activities. To wit: Last year, most of our activities were done online through videoconferences, one of which was the 25th TAC meeting.During the FFTC-TAC Meeting held on July 21, 2020, the TAC members agreed that with the present COVID-19 pandemic, the Center needs to adjust and adapt its projects and activities accordingly. And the FFTC management did. As recommended by the TAC, on December 1 and 2, 2020, we organized a policy forum on “Sustainable Agri-food Systems Under and Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Experts from Germany, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan took turns in presenting and discussing ways to cope with the current COVID-19 pandemic (Please click to news link on FFTC-AP Forum tackles building of agri-food system resilience to cope with COVID-19).The two-day agricultural policy forum on "Sustainable Agri-Food Systems Under and Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic" had 14 speakers from 9 countries and 4 session moderators discuss how different Asian countries adapt their agricultural activities under the current pandemic. This year, all activities of our 11 projects will be done online with seven of these having onsite counterparts in our home base in Taiwan (Please refer to the link for our schedule of projects for 2021). Regardless of whether the travel restrictions will be lifted or not in Taiwan and other Asian countries, we will push through with our 50th Anniversary Celebration on October 6 (this was originally set on April 22, 2020). It will be done both onsite (in Taipei) and online coinciding with a symposium that will tackle among other things, how the COVID-19 continues to affect Asian agriculture. As the pandemic continues, we will continue to do all the necessary adjustments in our projects and activities and we will keep you updated should there be any changes. Thank you very much and let us all be safe. Very truly yours, SU-SAN CHANG, Ph.D. Director Feb. 29, 2021 Dear FFTC Friends and Partners, The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted and affected practically all industry activities all over the world. We at FFTC have not been spared by the disruptions. Just like all developmental organizations, we are trying our best to cope with the situation and viewing everything as a challenge while making sure that the safety and health of our co-workers are still our top priority. Out of our 11 projects for 2020, we have already postponed one workshop which was originally scheduled in June to next year. For the rest of our activities, we have planned the following contingencies: Our FFTC Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) Meeting will be conducted on July 21, 2020 via videoconference. The FFTC management has requested the use of the videoconference facilities of one of the bureaus of Taiwan's Council of Agriculture - the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection Quarantine (BAPHIQ), whose management very kindly and willingly allowed us to use their facilities for the three-hour meeting. Together with our TAC members from Taiwan, we will be at the BAPHIQ headquarters, while our other TAC members from Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam will join us online. This September, our “2020 Dragon Fruit Workshop and Steering Committee Meeting—Dragon Fruit Value Chain for Global Market” will also be conducted via videoconference and we are planning to have a live mainstream of the two-day event, half-day of which will be devoted to the conduct of the Dragon Fruit Network’s Steering Committee meeting to formulate its next phase (2021-2023) project proposal. The workshop’s educational trip will be conducted prior to the workshop with the Taiwan participants joining the field exposure. An edited video recording of the field trip will also be shown and discussed during the videoconference. In October, our joint one-day symposium with the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) and Kasetsart University (KU) on “Smart Food Value Chain – The Solution to Asia’s Food Distribution,” will also be held online with NARO speakers livestreaming from Tokyo and the other speakers joining in from their respective countries. In November, we are also conducting our joint symposium with the Taiwan Livestock Research Institute, with contributions from the British Office and The Netherlands Office in Taipei on “The Practice and Benefits of Circular Agriculture in Waste Reducing and Recycling.” The event will be held live at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center back to back with the “Asia Agri-Tech Expo and Forum” organized by Informa Markets. It will also be conducted online for participating country representatives who still cannot travel to Taiwan. There will also be an exhibit of research highlights and the latest technologies on circular agriculture featuring crops, livestock, fisheries and forestry. For our other activities, we have a wait-and-see attitude. If the situation in the region gets better, we may have to push through with our original plans. However if the travel ban continues in some countries in the region, we are already preparing our other projects to make that online transition and adapt the videoconference mode as a way to conduct our other activities for the rest of the year. While face-to-face workshops and seminars will have to take a backseat for the time being, we are planning to produce webinars, infomercials, video blogs and produce more publications as alternative activities. We plan to maximize the use of our websites and the social media to disseminate information. Please find the updated “2020 FFTC Projects Schedule” and be guided accordingly. Business goes on as usual for us and you can check our websites and our FFTC Facebook page for updates. For any inquiries, comments or suggestions, you can also send us an email at info@fftc.org.tw Thank you very much, good luck on your present and future activities and please keep safe. Very truly yours, SU-SAN CHANG, Ph.D. Director June 12, 2020 FFTC is already making that online transition and adapting the videoconference mode in conducting its activities. Educational trips conducted in Taiwan will be video recorded, edited and will be shown and discussed in the videoconferences. In November, the Center is conducting its joint symposium with the Taiwan Livestock Research Institute, with contributions from the British Office and The Netherlands Office in Taipei on “The Practice and Benefits of Circular Agriculture in Waste Reducing and Recycling.”