In November 2023, Taiwan Public Television (PTS) reported that a whistleblower at Formosa Plastics' Sixth Naptha Cracker informed a local legislator about the forging of certificates of fire safety of petrochemical equipment: https://news.pts.org.tw/article/668279
The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study that the authors reference and model their call to action around is the worlds' largest scientific effort to quantify trends in health. It is lead by the Institute foe Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. It began in 1990 as a World Bank-commissioned study and is known for having introduced the disability-adujusted life year (DALY) as a new metric to quantify the burden of disease, injuries, and risk factors (or determinants), and enable comparisons.
The 1990s were a turning point for global health structures of governance and knowledge production, which the GBD study exemplifies. Global health experts began increasingly reframing health and healthcare in technical terms like DALY, removing health from public governance in ways that complemented and bolstered structural adjustment policies that were introduced in the 1980s (Janes 2004). As a result of these policies, the size, scope and reach of healthcare delivery and public health services were steadily reduced and downgraded. Anthropologists have been critical of these processes and other perceived failures in global health: the collapse of primary care initiatives fostered at Alma Ata in 1978, the resurgence of selective forms of primary care and vertical public health programs, and the ascendency of the World Bank as the principal health policymaking institution (Janes 2004, 2009).
Janes, Craig R (2004). "Going global in century XXI: medical anthropology and the new primary health care." Human Organization 63, no. 4: 457-471.
Janes, C. R., & Corbett, K. K. (2009). Anthropology and global health. Annual Review of Anthropology, 38, 167–183. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-091908-164314
“An expansion plan for the Sixth Naphtha Cracker Plant in Mailiao now has been turned down by locals and environmental activists because of the accident in Kaohsiung. Petrochemical companies are bleeding dry Taiwan’s rivers and ruining much of the island’s remaining wetlands. As Mingyi Wu claims, the petrochemical industry overlooks generation justice, environmental justice, and class justice (qtd. in Lu).” (Chang, 2023, p. 179)
“Wu and Wu’s book ends with an appeal to people to buy wetlands in an attempt to save Taiwan’s dolphins. They can do this through a trust fund set up by the Changhua Environmental Protection Union and other environmental groups (Wu and Wu 233). Chia-yang Tsai and others set up this national trust fund, the first of its kind in Taiwan, when they became aware that if regional plans were approved by the government, 2,000 hectares of tidal mudflats could be sold to Kuokuang Petrochemical at the low rate of NT$100 per square meter (Nelson).” (Chang, 2023, p. 177)
“The operators of the trust competing with Kuokuang project stakeholders offer to purchase land from the government for NT$119 a share. If enough people buy a share, the land can be saved from industrial development (Nelson). As Rui-bin Chen says, “[o]ne share or 100 shares, anyone can be a landowner!” (qtd. in Nelson). The national trust fund represents the power of the general public, and it stresses spontaneity and participation in maintaining the commons (ecological environments and cultural and historical sites).” (Chang, 2023, p. 177)
In his 2011 op-ed, Winston Dang 陳重信, Taiwan's former Environmental Protection Administration minister, calls for the re-evaluation of the Kuokuang Technology Co's eighth naphtha cracker complex and Formosa Steel Mill, both supposed to be built in Yunlin County. The Kuokuang project was eventually proposed for Dacheng, Changhua County, where it would threaten wetlands, but the project was later stopped. The Formosa Steel mill, in turn, was built in Central Vietnam.
During my fieldwork, I learned that one argument made by economists engaged in the anti-Kuokuang campaign was that the petrochemical products would be exported to China, leaving Taiwan only with the pollution, but not the products.
The book "Wetlands, Petrochemicals, and Imagining an Island 濕地、石化、島嶼想像" (Wu and Wu 2011), see also the review by Wen-Ling Tu (2011) and book chapter by Kathryn Yalan Chang (2023), quotes below.
“Wetlands, Petrochemicals, and Imagining an Island represents the voices of regional residents, environmental protection activists, artists, cultural critics, and university teachers and students from around the country. It offers an insight into grassroots bioregionalism through its mixture of local voices, place-related poetry, songs, essays, analyses of the Sixth Naphtha Cracker Plant (1991) in Yunlin County, discussions of the environmental impact assessment of petrochemical technologies in Changhua County, records of community events, and details of environmental activism. Wu and Wu and the other authors represented in the collection share the same concerns about how the petrochemical industry has greatly impacted the environment and public health.” (Chang, 2023, p. 163)
“What counts as the Taiwan environmental imagination in the event of the anti-Kuokuang campaign? The environmental imagination in Wu and Wu’s book is not an exclusively anthropocentric one; rather, it takes into consideration the threats to nonhuman species and the habitats of these species.” (Chang, 2023, p. 166)
“As Taiwanese culture continues to be influenced by liberalization, modernization, and westernization, social movements and political reforms are not taking, and need not take, the form of a radical political revolution or violent acts against the government. Anti-Kuokuang campaign actions include spiritual blessings and ceremonies, music videos, and social media petitions against Kuokuang Petrochemical Corporation Factory. Wu and Wu’s Wetlands, Petrochemicals, and Imagining an Island is also particularly significant, for it provides a historical and political environmental analysis of the Kuokuang. Even if a reader has no idea about the Kuokuang project, he/ she can learn about the project through the more creative material in the book such as poems and other creative writings.” (Chang, 2023, p. 172)
This news article (CNA 2023) focuses on a new data systrem developed by university researchers for modeling dioxin pollution in Taiwan, with Yunlin among those counties with high levels:
"EMSM is the world's first "integrated hybrid spatial estimation model" developed using geographic artificial intelligence. It uses the daily concentration of dioxins monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency's monitoring stations from 2006 to 2016 as the basis for modeling data, and uses the advantages of machine learning to integrate and stack A variety of spatial estimation methodologies are integrated to simulate the long-term, high-resolution atmospheric dioxin concentration changes in Taiwan."
"The "Integrated Hybrid Spatial Estimation Model" also shows the average concentration distribution of dioxins in Taiwan in 2015, among which Yunlin, Chiayi, Tainan, and Kaohsiung are areas with high atmospheric dioxin concentrations."
"Wu Zhida said that he will continue to study more detailed fine-grained methods, including time and space distribution presentation, to provide more detailed and accurate information, and add new algorithms and data collection to fill in the future sector forecasts as soon as possible, providing public sector, medical Unit-related information, and for the public to use practical reference and prepare for daily prevention."
“The anti-Kuokuang campaign resists top-down regulatory controls and solutions by working at the grassroots level to draw public attention to issues. For example, the campaign invites pop singers and local lyric writers to reach out to different ethnic groups and generations. Taiwanese singer Bobby Chen wrote the song “My Grandmother is a Matsu Fish” (Chang, Tie-zhi) to raise awareness about the impact of the petrochemical plants on the endangered dolphins. It refers to Matsu, the sea goddess widely worshipped by people in Taiwan and southeastern China as the protector of fishermen and sailors, as well as to the Chinese white dolphin (CWD), an animal species that also is known as a friend of shipwrecked sailors.” (Chang, 2023, p. 177)
“The Matsu Fish Conservation Union of Taiwan combined images of the Taiwanese goddess Matsu, protector of fishermen, with images of the Taiwan pink dolphin in order to bring more public attention to the anti-Kuokuang campaign. As argued by Peter S. Ross, Chairman of the Eastern Taiwan Strait Sousa Technical Advisory Working Group (ETSSTAWG), protecting dolphins and their habitat helps to protect and improve the health and productivity of coastal fisheries: the more dolphins there are, the stronger the food chain is, and the more abundant fishery resources there are (Huang).” (Chang, 2023, p. 176)