Abstract The government of Taiwan has established a system for farmers to relief the injuries caused by the imports of agricultural products since 1989. The system is a safeguard to assist the injured producers with temporary relief or a subsidy under the principle of fair trade. However, many problems exist in the current formula approach used to gauge the extent of injuries, because it fails to capture the dynamics of agricultural trade over time. It is necessary to review and improve the formula. The purpose of this research is to investigate the shortcomings associated with the existing formula and to identify more robust and easy-to-compute alternatives. The new formula should be able to reflect the true impacts caused by the imports with minimal burden on data collection so that real-time outputs can be easily produced for the stakeholders. Our empirical analysis not only provides practical information for the relevant authorities to understand the biases created by the existing formula, but also offers directions for improvements of the agricultural product import relief system for the future.