Why are Taiwanese farmers apparently so willing to let large areas of their farmland lie idle? The answer is that they have little choice in the matter.
From the 1980s, the nation has been going through a steady process of trade liberalization. This has meant that the number of high-quality, inexpensive agricultural imports has been increasing. When Taiwan joined the WTO in 2002, it had an agricultural trade deficit of NT$4 billion (US$137.8 million) and this climbed to just above NT$10 billion eight years later. Given the grave challenges the agricultural industry now faces, one cannot blame farmers for being uncertain about which crops would be best to plant. They were forced into this situation by trade liberalization.
To deal with the impact of trade liberalization, the authorities started in 1984 to encourage farmers to move away from rice and wheat crops to cereals or grains or, alternatively, to let the land lie idle. Many farmers did attempt to transition to cereals and grains, but still found it difficult to compete with agricultural imports and eventually had to comply with the policy of leaving land uncultivated. This meant that the amount of idle farmland increased from 5,700 hectares in 1984, to 200,000 hectares last year. Farmers were again left with little alternative, this time due to government policy.
Taiwan has limited resources, so it may be difficult for people to understand why farmers are leaving farmland fallow, especially when the government is spending almost NT$10 billion every year on agricultural subsidies. This has made many suspicious: having uncultivated, fallow land has come to be seen as a kind of sin. A sin it may be, but the farmers have their hands tied.
Land is left idle due to a combination of factors, including ownership structure, farmland rotation and the way farms operate. The government has developed a set of measures to bring fallow land back into use, support local cereal and grain production so it can compete with imports, develop strategic local specialty produce, promote competitive agricultural exports and encourage older farmers to rent out their farmland.
In general, these measures are moving in the right direction, but the roots of the fallow land problem reside in the structure of the agricultural sector and in the increasingly internationalized nature of trade. Unless these two factors are better understood and dealt with, these measures are likely to address only the symptoms of the issue and not get to its roots. This is especially true if Taiwan signs a free-trade agreement with the US or joins the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would make the international factor even more relevant. How can the nation deal with the root causes of the issue? It will take a concerted effort.
First, an agricultural supply chain must be established, along with a revised farmers’ pension scheme and a farmland mobility system. Furthermore, the functions of the Council of Agriculture-backed Farmland Bank should be increased to encourage elderly farmers and those with idle land to hand their land over to the bank. The bank could then lease the land to younger, more able-bodied farmers or consortia representing farmers or landowners that could enter into contracts with distributors to supply agricultural products for domestic and export markets.
These improvements would make the industry more efficient and enhance the competitiveness of local agricultural products in the international market. This would bring financial reward to farmers and farmland would be put to good use. It would turn around a situation in which farmers have no alternative but to leave some or all of their land idle, and give the whole industry cause to smile.
Huang Biing-wen is a professor in the Department of Applied Economics at National Chung Hsing University.
Translated by Paul Cooper
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers