2014 Top Ten GMO News Stories in Taiwan, China Revealed: Non-GMO School Lunches Draw the Most Attention
Launched by the Campus Lunch Goes GMO-Free Action Team, the two-week online "2014 Taiwan Top Ten GMO News Poll" closed yesterday (12/31), with a total of 106 people taking part. The poll results showed that news related to "candidates signing a pledge to remove GMO foods from campuses" received more than 80 percent of the votes, making it the most closely watched domestic event, followed by "civil marches responding to the global March Against Monsanto" and "GMO food ingredients brought under legal regulation," which each had a support rate of more than 60 percent.
Continued Policy Oversight, Responding to Global Action
At present, fifteen newly elected county and city heads nationwide have signed a pledge to remove GMO foods from campuses. One of the main tasks of the action team this year is to continue overseeing how each county and city implements its policies. Now that this has also been chosen as the most important GMO news of 2014, it reflects an atmosphere in which the public expects politicians to take action and fulfill their campaign promises.
In addition, the global March Against Monsanto, which took second place in popularity, will also be held on May 23 this year, and it is hoped that more friends in Taiwan will join people around the world in taking to the streets to stand up against GMO crops.
The poll was prepared in a very short time. The original intention was to use the poll to provide an opportunity for civic education and to invite the public to quickly browse and review the important GMO-related events that happened in Taiwan over the whole year. Because GMO news is a relatively niche topic, and because this was Taiwan's first poll campaign with this as its annual theme, amid the many distractions at the end of the year and with promotion only through the internet, the founding partners even worried that there might be a situation of "ten thousand people responding, one person voting." Therefore, the result of more than one hundred participants this time encouraged the action team, and it could consider starting this year by selecting one to two relevant important news items each month and accumulating them until the end of the year for an annual poll.
The Character Representing the 2014 Campus Lunch Goes GMO-Free Action
Looking back over the past three months, the action team chose the character "Nuo" (promise) as the character representing the 2014 Campus Lunch Goes GMO-Free Action.
During the campaign period for the nine-in-one public official elections, thanks to the participation and pledges of netizens from all walks of life, the strength and opinions of people in each county and city were gathered, bringing some changes to the issue of campus lunches for elementary and junior high school students and to Taiwan's GMO food issue. On the one hand, the written pledges made by politicians during the election period will continue to be monitored by the public; on the other hand, the actions of partners around Taiwan in participating in public affairs in 2014 are just like our promise to our children, to society, and to ourselves, and we are willing to keep working together this year to drive GMO foods out of campus lunches.
The 2014 Taiwan Top Ten GMO News will be announced on the Facebook fan page of "Campus Lunch Goes GMO-Free," and two people will also be selected to receive a "GMO-Free Banner." Netizens who care about the GMO issue are invited to visit the event webpage to learn about the GMO events that happened on this land of Taiwan last year, and it is hoped even more that more people this year will actively take part in Taiwan's surging wave of GMO-free actions.