Now that the presidential race is under way, the candidates are at pains to emphasize the importance of farmers, promising all kinds of inducements — look no further than the White Paper on agriculture — and proffering promises of protecting farmers and ensuring that they live good lives, if they are elected.
These promises will be broken, one by one, after the election is over. Grandiose sentiments bandied around by electioneering politicians are seldom followed through once their term in office is secured.
The government has allocated a budget of over NT$100 billion (US$3.3 billion) for agriculture, but that has not prevented farmers living hard lives, earning just NT$884,000 per household per annum on average, compared to the national average annual household income of NT$1.12 million. The reason for this failure is that the government’s farming policy is overly ambitious and unrealistic.
Most people would concur that to do a job well, the workman should first prepare his tools. The government needs to formulate an effective policy to ensure parity of supply and demand. This means collating an accurate database on farmers collating the production capacity each has. It would then be possible to plan for inconsistencies in supply and demand and to set up price alerts, all of which would help stabilize agricultural prices and farmers’ incomes.
Unfortunately, with the changes in government and therefore of ministers of agriculture, it has been impossible to establish an accurate database on domestic farming production or on annual produce-specific production capacities.
This is exacerbated by manpower shortages and poor funding at the local government level, which leaves one suspicious about the accuracy of the data in the annual reports submitted to the central government.
The partisan spat over subsidies for elderly farmers going on in the legislature has been brought on in part because local governments lack accurate figures on the number of farmers and about the situation on the ground.
This means they are ill-equipped to distinguish the genuinely productive farmers from the so-called “bogus” ones who happen to own farmland and take advantage of a subsidy system designed to help working farmers. The public is starting to cry foul.
Then there are the tens of billions of New Taiwan dollars spent every year on agricultural subsidies to little discernible effect. Experts have consistently recommended the adoption of a system of targeted subsidies from which farmers would directly benefit, and Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has promised that she would push for such a system if elected.
The problem remains that a prerequisite of such a system would be a comprehensive agricultural production database, with details of the circumstances of individual farmers, including factors like their production costs. However, the departments concerned simply do not have this kind of information.
Any attempt to push for a system like this would require careful preparation, otherwise it could lead to even further chaos.
Both Tsai and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who is running for re-election, say they would push for an insurance system for the agriculture and fisheries industries, but in the absence of accurate information or way of assessing the severity of damage to various agricultural products or the situation in disaster-hit farming regions, it is difficult to see how this would bring assurance and stability to farmers.
Furthermore, the current policy is too top-down and too much of a blanket policy. While it is true that the majority of policymakers are well educated, both in Taiwan and overseas, and very competent in their fields, they do not have much of an idea about what is really happening on the ground.
They are more used to formulating policy in the comfort of their air-conditioned offices and, when faced with backlashes from various parts of the country, more likely to hold yet another meeting than go see what the problem is.
The result is that they fail to get to the root of the problem and as a consequence fail to understand what it is that the farmers want and need.
I remember the days of the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, which later merged with the Council of Agriculture, when senior officials would remind younger colleagues of the importance of field surveys and of the need for going out and inspecting localities, listening to farmers and assessing the situation, so that they could get a practical understanding of what problems and issues farming communities and individual farmers faced.
That, they said, was the only way one could formulate a policy that came anywhere near to representing the public’s needs.
Unfortunately, agricultural officials nowadays, perhaps because of the limitations of the system or the prevailing institutional culture, frequently rush down to the locality in the morning and then hurry back to the office in the afternoon to deal with the paperwork, losing out on the opportunity to listen to what farmers have to say and get a handle on the real situation.
They would learn far more if they took the trouble to stick around and talk to people.
Both presidential candidates, blue and green alike, are talking about fairness and justice, but they do not seem to have much enthusiasm when it comes to addressing problems — such as exploitation by middlemen — that farmers have been complaining about for so long.
If these problems are allowed to continue, they threaten to become a real nightmare for farmers.
It does not really matter how much advice the candidates receive or how good it is, as far as they are concerned the most politically expedient course of action is to promise immediate subsidies and benefits for farmers.
They are more interested in cozying up to farmers than actually helping them turn things around. If these politicians really want to improve the lot of farmers, they will have to start with the basics.
Lee Wu-chung is a professor of agricultural economics.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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