Taipei, June 28 (CNA) Farmers in Fangshan Township in Pingtung County are receiving new orders for mangos from local businesses after they complained of orders being canceled due to fears of an outbreak in the region of the highly infectious Delta variant of COVID-19.
Fangshan Township is famous for producing Irwin mangoes, but township chief Hung Chi-neng (洪啟能) said at a press event Monday that many orders for the in-season fruit have been canceled amid fears the coronavirus could be transmitted via the fruit or its packaging.
Calling his township the victim of the coronavirus outbreak, Hung said sales of mangoes are the main source of income for Fangshan residents, and he urged people across Taiwan to support the township’s mango farmers.
Hung did not say how many orders have been canceled or what percentage of the crop the canceled orders represented.
But a number of local businesses have answered the call, with Mega International Commercial Bank, First Commercial Bank, and Taiwan Business Bank saying Monday they had ordered 4.3, 3 and 3 metric tons of mangoes, respectively, from farmers in Pingtung, to show their support.
According to Fangshan mango farmers, the cancellation of orders was mainly due to a message spread online warning that the area’s Irwin mangoes likely carried the Delta variant of the coronavirus.
Pingtung prosecutors on Monday said they were probing the origin of the information concerning the Fangshan mangoes.
The cluster in the southern county has led to 12 confirmed infections so far, eight of which have been determined to be caused by the Delta variant, according to the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC).
The CECC believes the cluster infection began when a woman in her 50s and her grandson returned to Pingtung from Peru on June 6.

Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel