Agriculture has seen its importance in Taiwan subside significantly in the past 50 years, accounting for just 1.5 percent of the nation’s GDP in 2008, compared with 32.2 percent in 1952. Nonetheless, the sector is still crucial to Taiwan in terms of food security and conservation.
Nowadays, when visiting any farming village around the country, one only sees aging farmers, old facilities and a sizable amount of land lying fallow. According to the government’s census data, full-time farming households made up about 21 percent of the total population in 2007, down from 40 percent in 1955, and only 740,000 people were employed by the sector in 2007, compared with 1.67 million in 1955.
A major problem for Taiwan’s agricultural sector is the small scale of farming. Official data show that in 2006 the average farm size in Taiwan was 1 hectare, compared with 1.6 hectares in Japan, 20 hectares in the EU and 190 hectares in the US. Moreover, among all farming households in this country, only 25 percent own a farm larger than 1 hectare. Given this abundance of small farms and resulting lack in economies of scale, and in the face of pressure from global trade liberalization, efforts to pursue higher productivity and competitiveness for Taiwan’s agriculture sector would seem to be fruitless.
The Farm Villages Revival Act (農村再生條例) — which aims to renew about 4,000 farm and fishing villages around the country over 10 years and passed its third reading in the legislature on Wednesday — has failed to address these issues, which prompted several groups of farmers to stage an overnight sit-in protest in front of the Presidential Office yesterday.
Under the law, the government will allocate NT$150 billion (US$4.67 billion) over a period of 10 years to construct rural infrastructure projects, renovate individual farmhouses, proceed with cultural preservation and ecological conservation, develop leisure farming and nurture local talent.
The law also stipulates that organizations in farming villages will have the ability to propose renewal plans to authorities, and only farmers and fishermen are eligible to apply for funding and participate in the revival projects.
However, this has not eased concern that business groups might collude with major rural organizations to control revival projects, or that idle farmland will fall into the hands of land speculators. Not to mention that owners of small farms and their tenants will have to compete with four major rural groups — farmers’ associations, fishermen’s associations, irrigation associations and agricultural cooperatives, which have close links with grassroots politicians — for government funding.
While these concerns are indeed important, the major problem with the legislation lies with the fact that the government is pursuing infrastructure construction rather than industrial upgrading to address Taiwan’s agricultural problems.
Yunlin County Commissioner Su Chih-fen (蘇治芬) rightly pointed out on Wednesday that the law only aims to provide farmers and fishermen with a better living environment and does nothing to offer them better means to earn a living, and that it does not address any of the agricultural sector’s overarching challenges.
Now that the law has been passed, the government and all taxpayers need to make sure that the funds are used and distributed properly and that effective oversight mechanisms are established.
Unfortunately, despite the passage of the Farm Villages Revival Act, Taiwan is still in dire need of a policy which can help farmers lower production costs and adopt modern practices in marketing, assist them to integrate resources and farmlands to boost economic scale and eventually enhance their production efficiency and competitiveness.
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