The Council of Agriculture indicated that, in order to market Taiwan’s quality fruits, it held a universal vote-casting campaign for all the people to vote for what they think are Taiwan’s ten best fruits from July through October 2007. At the same time, COA will give away intricately made magnets with a pattern of Taiwan’s fruits in five major hypermarkets like Geant Hypermarket. COA called on all the people to go on line to vote for Taiwan’s home-grown top ten fruits, consume as many fruits as possible and collect intricately made fruit-patterned magnetic puzzle pieces, thereby allowing home-grown fruits to be generally recognized by the people and giving a boost to Taiwan’s agriculture for it to take off.

COA expounded that, in order to give the people a more profound appreciation of Taiwan’s fruits to reinforce the promotion of home-grown fruits, COA has made city and prefecture governments recommend thirty quality home-grown fruits for people to choose from in March 2007 and constructed a vote-casting website for top ten fruits (http:/top10fruit.afa. gov.tw) to present their characteristics and ways to purchase them to the people. Apart from that, there are offered fruit recipes, Mr. Su’s Tips for Making Ice Snacks and glamorous tablecloths for people to download. Those who participate in the online vote-casting campaign will be automatically entered in the lucky draw to be held by COA at the end of November. The prizes include a plasma TV set, vouchers of a vacation in the dude ranch and fruit calendars. The vote-casting period starts from today to the end of October and COA urged all people to aggressively take part in the vote-casting campaign to pick top ten home-grown fruits.

As part of the top-ten fruit vote-casting campaign, COA has commissioned designers to design intricately made and collect-worthy magnetic puzzle pieces with patterns of Taiwan fruits for people to collect. Anybody who makes a purchase of home-grown fruits with a value over 200 NTD in 300 marts and supermarkets nationwide including the five major distribution outlets of Geant, RT-MART, Carrefour, Wellcome and Hsin-Nong will be granted a fruit-patterened magnet. Collect thirty different fruit-patterned magnets and piece them together and you will have a complete picture of Taiwan. Consumers who send back the packaging of the thirty different fruit-patterned magnets to the organizer will receive a set of puzzle plate made up of fruit magnets for free and be given the opportunity to enter the lucky draw, whose prizes include a plasma TV set, 5,000 NTD-valued fruit gift certificates and bicycles.

COA implored the people to go on line to vote for the top ten fruits right away and consume as many savory, fresh, safe and really wonderful quality home-grown fruits as possible as an attempt to partake of the hardships of fruit-growers and share in their joy and take concrete actions to back up Taiwan’s fruits and fruit growers.