Taiwan's remaining allies deepen cooperation across semiconductors, food, health

Guatemala opens first chip-design course as Taipei deepens sector-specific aid

The diplomatic activity at the United Nations General Assembly last month directed public attention to a set of bilateral programs that have been deepening through specific development projects rather than identical aid templates, according to a UPI opinion column by Thomas R. Field, Regional Representative for Latin America of the Global Peace Foundation. Field, who has lived and worked in Latin America for more than four decades, wrote that what each host government asked for shaped the design of its partnership with Taipei, rather than a uniform program applied across the seven countries.

Taiwan has formal diplomatic relations with 12 governments worldwide, seven of them in Latin America and the Caribbean. The roster has shrunk over the past decade as countries switched recognition to Beijing: Panama in 2017, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador in 2018, Nicaragua in 2021, and Honduras in 2023. Beijing conditions diplomatic relations on acceptance of its one-China principle, and each of Taiwan’s remaining partners has made that calculation against its ties with Taipei.

On Sept. 23, three of Taiwan’s allies — from the Latin American, Pacific, and African components of that broader group — used their General Assembly remarks to argue for Taipei’s participation in the international system. Paraguayan President Santiago Peña framed the issue in terms his audience could not miss. “If oil was the fuel of the 20th century,” he said, “chips are the fuel of the 21st, and Taiwan’s exclusion is a stain on the United Nations.” Palauan President Surangel Whipps Jr. and King Mswati III of Eswatini made similar calls.

Five days earlier, on Sept. 18, the U.N. ambassadors of Belize, Saint Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, joined by counterparts from Palau and the Marshall Islands, sent Secretary-General Guterres a letter making the parallel case, Field reported.

The work the alliances translate into at the country level varies sharply from place to place. In Guatemala, where Taiwan established diplomatic relations in 1933 in one of its oldest surviving alliances, the government of President Bernardo Arévalo has launched what it calls a “Ruta del Chip” strategy to insert the country into global semiconductor supply chains. During Arévalo’s visit to Taipei in June 2025, the two governments signed a letter of intent on semiconductor cooperation. Guatemala’s Economy Minister Gabriela García has said 28 Guatemalan professionals completed specialized training in Taiwan in 2025, with more in 2026, and the effort is designed to multiply that expertise at home. This year, Universidad Galileo hosted Guatemala’s first semiconductor-design course.

Haiti’s partnership with Taiwan has held through chronic instability and the current security crisis, touching its seventh decade. In August, Taiwan’s development fund expanded a rice project in southern Haiti with Food For The Poor and the firm WES TRADE, equipping farmer associations with improved seed, drying fields, mills and warehouses, and soil and weather sensors. Jacques Liu, the fund’s project manager, put it bluntly: “This is not a gift.” Farmers receive seed, fertilizer, and technical support through their associations and return most of the value after harvest, so the next group can be supplied, according to Field.

In St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the partnership is visible in concrete and steel. Taiwan has backed the new Arnos Vale Acute Care Hospital and the modernization of Kingstown Port. A youth agriculture initiative launched in 2025 carries a budget of roughly $3.1 million, $2.5 million of it from Taiwan, and its first cohort graduated in July.

The remaining four partners apply the same logic to different priorities. In July 2025, Taiwan approved Belizean shrimp exports after more than two years of technical and regulatory work, opening a market that averaged more than $349 million in annual shrimp imports from 2020 through 2024. In Saint Lucia, where ties were restored in 2007, a “Seven Crops Project” works to cut dependence on imported food, and 76 farmers completed a six-week training program in August. St. Kitts and Nevis launched a Green Energy Transition Demonstration Project in April and is exploring a pathway for students to study medicine in Taiwan. Paraguay, the seventh, is a larger story Field has told separately.

Taken together, the seven relationships form what Taiwan’s foreign ministry labels the Diplomatic Allies Prosperity Project, launched by Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung in 2024 to channel Taiwanese capability into semiconductors, new energy, smart agriculture, medicine, and sustainable tourism. In July, the ministry opened a Diplomatic Allies Prosperity Economic and Trade Office under its development fund to draw private Taiwanese firms into those markets.

The diplomatic traffic runs in both directions. Taiwan is excluded from the United Nations and most of its specialized agencies, and its allies raise its participation in forums where Taipei cannot speak for itself — including the General Assembly in September and the World Health Assembly in Geneva in May. None of this is cost-free, and none of it settles the larger argument: China is the world’s second-largest economy and a major trading partner across the region, and Beijing’s one-China principle remains the gateway condition for relations.

For the seven governments that have kept relations with Taipei, the calculation has produced a portfolio that ranges from chip-design courses to rice mills to hospitals. For Taiwan, the combination of formal recognition and allied voices in international forums is something its larger, unofficial partners cannot provide, according to Field’s UPI column.