With the trend of market globalization and technological advancement, many experts had recommended RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) as one of the important technologies focus in the past three years. In order to make RFID apply to agriculture simultaneously, the Council of Agriculture and Acer Company especially held a joint “RFID Technology for Agriculture Application Seminar” on August 10. This seminar invited the vice minister of the Council of Agriculture Li Chien-chen, president Shi Chen-yungof the iD SoftCapital Group and experts in the government and the research institutions who were specialized in the RFID technology to exchange and share their experiences about the application of the RFID technology on agriculture.

Among a series of activities, Li pointed out that the problems of Taiwan’s agriculture lay in mainly on marketing, rather than production. Only by changing “agricultural products” into “agricultural commodities” and by improving agricultural marketing can upgrade Taiwan’s agricultural competitiveness on the international market. There already had been more than sixty items of agricultural products with production and marketing record on the market since the Council of Agriculture promoted the product feasibility system accessibly. At the same time, RFID has also gradually walked into consumers’ daily lives. In the future, with the help of RFID technology, agriculture may develop more pluralistic applications in order to assist Taiwan’s agriculture to establish a modern logistic system and to cultivate a unique Taiwan’s agricultural image.

In the seminar, Mr. Shi said Taiwan’s development started from agriculture to industry and from industry to information technology and finally to the knowledge economy. Therefore, people should prepare themselves to meet the coming of the era of knowledge economy and to make Taiwan a “Value-added Island” in the future. Moreover, in the development of agriculture in Taiwan, it should pursue innovation in order to make Taiwan’s agriculture becoming an industry with high added value. In the future, the Brand Taiwan Foundation will actively assist Taiwan’s agriculture toward internationalization and brand creation in order to market Taiwan’s agricultural products around the globe. He further suggested that Taiwan should develop added-value tourism in conjunction with farmers’ occupational conditions. He also encouraged people to continuously do research and develop technology and to manage knowledge, to adopt intellectual property rights that can effectively protect both the government and the private sector, and to make use of lands and human resources from market locations in order to produce competitive agricultural products to cultivate the agricultural advantage.
　　
The Council of Agriculture indicated that the RFID technology applied in agriculture areas: 1. Production: to research and develop RFID on different products such as crop, fishing, livestock, and fowl to add to the best pattern of products in order to boost the production benefit. 2. Marketing: to research and develop agricultural products on different patterns of marketing combined with the best RFID application methods in order to elevate marketing benefit. 3. Safety: to establish a public transparency and traceability system through RFID in order to ensure the safety of agricultural products to gain benefit of consumers’ confidence.
　　
At the same time, the Council of Agriculture encouraged premier trial run plans of each area of agriculture to build successful cases and to elevate management efficiency. This kind of method could continuously spread out in the realm of enterprises in order to enhance the developmental environment of agriculture technology and to establish a thorough information system which closely related with international community to augment international competitiveness.