The Cabinet-level Council of Agriculture (COA) on Tuesday reiterated its commitment to preventing Chinese garlic from entering Taiwan through a third location, particularly countries in Southeast Asia. As garlic is one of the 830 items of Chinese products banned from entering Taiwan, the COA said the government is doing everything possible to avoid a transshipment of Chinese garlic via a third country or area. To serve that end, the COA's Agriculture and Food Agency had notified local importers in a mid-November meeting that strict measures would be adopted to screen Chinese garlic transshipped into Taiwan from a third party. Local importers are required to attach documents, including transport contracts, customs clearance reports, and government-issued papers to verify the origins of their imported goods and other related documents to identify the producers, producing venues and the size of plantation areas, the council stressed. Imported garlic will be sent to Taiwan's overseas office for re-examination if it is hard to identify its place of production, it added. The COA said it also has suggested the Bureau of Foreign Trade ban garlic imports from Vietnam, from where large amounts of Chinese garlic are transshipped into Taiwan. The COA's statement came after hundreds of garlic farmers from central Taiwan's Yunlin County staged a protest in front of the county government headquarters on Monday. The farmers discarded many boxes of China-produced garlic which were transshipped into Taiwan from Vietnam to protest against what they claimed was the central government's lack of concern for Taiwanese farmers' livelihoods. According to some of the protesting farmers, garlic cultivated in Vietnam is not enough to meet its own local demand, not to mention the possibility of exporting it to other countries. If Chinese garlic continues to enter Taiwan through transshipment from Vietnam, it would deal a heavy blow to locally-produced garlic, which is set to hit the domestic market one month later, said a chief delegate of a local farmers'association. Garlic is one of the major farm produce in central and southern Taiwan, with 5,400 hectares of farmland across the country devoted to its cultivation. Garlic production in Taiwan is valued at around NT$2.1 billion (US$66.03 million) annually, the COA said. Garlic grown in Yunlin County accounts for 85 percent of Taiwan's overall production. 