Apart from the Feitsui Reservoir (翡翠水庫) in New Taipei City, water storage levels at all the important reservoirs in the nation are running seriously low.
To ensure that domestic and industrial demand for water in the first half of this year can be met, an emergency drought response team established by the Ministry of Economic Affairs early last month decided to call a halt to rice cultivation and irrigation in five zones in Greater Taoyuan, Greater Taichung and Hsinchu, Miaoli and Chiayi counties. A total of 41,576 hectares — the second-broadest in history — are affected by the restrictions.
The government has said it will provide subsidies for the areas that must suspend irrigation and be left fallow, and that it will put extra effort into communication and guidance, so as to safeguard farmers’ interests.
Until Jan. 26, 2000, when it was amended, the Agricultural Development Act (農業發展條例) stipulated that only self-tilling farmers, meaning those who cultivate the land they own, could buy and sell land. Thus, apart from rental arrangements registered with township offices under the 37.5 Percent Arable Rent Reduction Act (耕地三 七 五減租條例), most farmland was tilled by the owners themselves. Consequently, landowners were the designated recipients of subsidies when fields had to be left fallow because of droughts.
In other words, the system was set up to subsidize self-tilling farmers. That was all well and good, but when the rule restricting land sales was deleted, it became possible for anybody to buy land, perhaps to build villas, or to wait for the land to be converted to a different use category so that it could be used for purposes other than farming. Under such circumstances, the provision of subsidies with landowners as the designated recipients became divorced from the original purpose of subsidization, turning it into a sheer waste of money.
For farmers who can only rent land to cultivate — like Tien Shou-hsi (田守喜) of Hsinchu County, who won a Champion Rice award, but whose land has nearly all been expropriated; and Chuang Cheng-teng (莊正燈), also of Hsinchu County, who won a Classic Rice award; as well as young farmers who want to go on working in the farming sector — the irrigation stoppage means unemployment. To make matters worse, they are not entitled to receive unemployment benefits as industrial workers are.
It was not until 2010 that subsidies for leaving land fallow in case of drought were redefined as being collectible by the actual tillers of the land in question. In other words, if farmland is subject to a rental arrangement, the subsidy is meant to be collected by the lessee who cultivates the land.
However, landowners and lessees may come to their own agreements about who gets what share of the subsidy. In practice, because landless farmers are, as they always have been, in a relatively disadvantaged social and economic position, the outcome of such negotiations tends to be that most of the subsidy is collected by landowners.
Even if the subsidy is shared out in a reasonable way, for those who leave their land fallow under the optimum subsidy conditions and plant green manure in place of food crops, their income per hectare planted will only be about NT$85,000. That is a woefully inadequate income for landowners and farmers who depend on farming for survival. If the subsidy has to be further carved up between a lessor and the farmer who actually tills the land, it will make things even worse for farmers who can only get by renting land to farm.
Agriculture offers triple values — those of production, life and the ecological environment. According to a research report published by the Council of Agriculture in 2000 regarding the three values of paddies, basing its estimates on commodity prices at the time, the values provided by each season’s harvest for each hectare came to about NT$490,000. Similar estimates done in Europe, North America, Japan and South Korea are also used as the basis for calculating benefits paid out to support farmers’ livelihoods, or for land-based payments.
Such direct payments are different from the kind of production and marketing price subsidies that are forbidden by the WTO on the grounds that they may influence free-market competition. European and North American countries, Japan and South Korea have been providing such benefit payments for many years as a means of protecting their agriculture and farmers, whereas the Taiwanese government has been going in the opposite direction.
Article 18 of the Water Act (水利法) sets out priorities for water usage, with top priority going to supply for domestic and public use, followed by agricultural use and then industrial use. This means that there is a legal basis for cutting the supply of water for agricultural use to safeguard supply for domestic and public use, which is given top priority because it is the most urgent.
However, the government does not see things in the same way as other countries that cherish and protect their farming sectors. Instead, successive governments have long favored industry over agriculture. The authorities pay no heed to the importance of food sovereignty to maintain national sovereignty. Despite the fact that the nation’s food self-sufficiency rate is worryingly low, vast amounts of agricultural water are regularly transferred and sold for industrial use. To make matters worse, on paper this water is still counted as being for agricultural use, with the result that the farming sector gets accused of consuming a lot of water while generating low production value.
Every time there is a drought, the authorities suspend cultivation and irrigation — measures that have the effect of ruining agriculture and eliminating farmers, while stripping farmers of their right to use water and handing it over to the industrial sector. Even under normal circumstances, water for farming is often partially transferred for other purposes, and when there is a drought farmers may be ordered to stop irrigating their fields entirely.
Whichever it is, farmers never know about it until after the government announces these measures. Since they have no say whatsoever beforehand, they have to accept whatever the government throws at them. Under such circumstances, any claim by the government that it is communicating with farmers is sure to ring hollow.
In March 2009, Taiwan ratified two important human rights conventions — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Article 11, Paragraph 1 of the latter convention states that everyone has the right to an adequate standard of living. A related document — General Comment No. 15 of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights — calls on governments to safeguard disadvantaged groups’ right to water.
Aside from the issue of advance notice, if the government must really go on giving industry priority access to water, it should at least collect a certain amount of water rights transfer fees from factories that enjoy that priority access, and then pay this revenue to farmers who actually till the fields according to a price ratio converted from the triple value of paddy fields. That is the only way in which such farmers can hope to provide an adequate standard of living for themselves and their families.
Beyond this, it should be borne in mind that the overall rate of tap water leakage for the whole of Taiwan stands at about 22 percent. A timetable should be set to improve this situation step by step and year by year.
Perhaps the government will not take such steps. Maybe it has failed to learn from the protests and resistance that have taken place in reaction to the seizure of water for the Central Taiwan Science Park’s fourth-phase development, as well as the message conveyed by the results of the local elections held on Nov. 29 last year. If the government sticks to its old ways, farmers and other citizens will be forced once again to rise up in rebellion against this policy model that is so extremely slanted in favor of big capital and the rich and powerful.
Chan Shun-kuei is a board member of the Taiwan Rural Front and Treasure Our Land, Taiwan.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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