Experts fear Taiwan losing agricultural edge to China

The continuous outflow of agricultural technology from Taiwan is changing China, and the changes are paving the way for China to replace Taiwanese agricultural products sold not only in overseas markets, but also locally.

Given lack of a comprehensive survey on the scope of technology drain, an official from the Council of Agriculture (COA) told the Taipei Times on condition of anonymity that the council does not have a thorough understanding of the situation, as it does not conduct firsthand investigations in China. Still, anecdotes and the experiences of agricultural experts illustrate the severity of the outflow and its consequences.

According to a report from the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), China has spared no effort to attract investment and technology from Taiwan's agricultural sector.

Since 1996, when the Chinese authorities established six "special regions for cross-strait agricultural cooperation" -- in Fujian, Shaanxi, Heilongjlang, Hainan, and Shandong provinces -- it has, up to this June, attracted about 4,740 investment projects from more than 1,200 Taiwanese businesses, by providing them with cheap production costs and spacious land, the report said.

Although the amount, accounting for 8 percent of the country's total investment in China, is relatively small, the loss of the technologies and crop strains transferred along with the investment in China pose a threat to Taiwan's agricultural development, analysts said.

COA Minister Lee Chiang-chuan (李健全) cited an example including soybean and tilapia fish to illustrate that "China had overtaken Taiwan as the largest exporter of these two products to Japan, about ten years after the strains were brought to China."

Over the past decade, Taiwan has been losing its specific agricultural technology and various species strains created by local agricultural experts, said Hsu Chih-jen (許志仁), chairman of Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA).

"Seeing the Dendrobium, a kind of native Taiwanese orchid, the Pingtung black-pearl strain of wax apple, as well as the Kaohsiung `Yu Her Pau' lychee and others successfully grown in China almost makes me lose confidence in Taiwanese agriculture," he said.

The government has said that it would establish an effective mechanism to prevent agricultural technology and species from flowing into China, with the Ministry of Economic Affairs increasing the number of items on the forbidden investment list from 13 to 436 in 2002, The government is considering adding more items to the list.

Agricultural experts, however, doubt the effectiveness of the regulations.

For example, "just one year after the new type of papaya, Tainung No. 6, hit the market in 1998, it was seen in China that some farmers started to develop this kind of strain with the help of Taiwanese agricultural experts," said Wu Ming-ming (吳明敏), secretary-general of the Taiwan Agricultural Academia-Industry Alliance.

Taking example of tilapia, Shih Sheng-lung (石聖龍), a director of the Fisheries Administration at the COA said the prosperity of China's tilapia aquaculture sector in the past decade was driven mainly by Taiwanese fish experts teaching the Chinese the techniques of parthenogenetic reproduction, which can accelerate the growth of tilapia.

An released on March 14 by China.com, a Chinese-language media Web site, said that more than 2,000 varieties of plant strains and more than 700 different agricultural technologies have been introduced from Taiwan to Fujian Province.

In Hainan Province, more than 500 varieties of species which bred about 1,000kg of seeds, 10 million nursery-grown plants, 300 million fish fry and 20,000 livestock in one year were brought in from Taiwan, the article also said.

While that there is difficulty in retaining the strains through regulation as seeds are extremely portable, Cheng Kuo-chung (鄭國忠), a legislator from a constitutency in Tainan composed mainly of farmers, said that the lack of "national awareness" was the main reason there were so many loopholes in the regulations.

Cheng the Taipei Times that one former COA minister has been cultivating eels in China through a company he started in Vietnam after he retired from the ministry, and was thereby transferring technology to China.

"There is also a former politician from Baihe (白河) Township in Tainan putting money into planting `Yu Her Pau' lychee in Hainan for five years," he said.

A National Taiwan University (NTU) agricultural professor, requesting anonymity, also told the Taipei Times about his experience. A COA official, who has now achieved a senior post, once came to his office in 1999, asked him to ask some agricultural experts to work in China, and promised that the experts would be paid monthly salaries in excess of NT$100,000.

"The Chinese government has already set up a four-stage process in developing its agriculture, by bringing in our investment, absorbing our technology, producing better products than we do and then replacing our products eventually," the professor said, noting that "it is a highly unacceptable thing for our government officials to cooperate with the Chinese side for the sake of making profits for themselves."

Another example was Ruan Yi-ming (阮逸明), who went to China to teach tea-growing techniques after he retired from his position as the director of a state-owned tea research and development center based in Taichung.

Considering difficulty in putting an end to the technology outflow, Warren Kuo (郭華仁), a professor at the department of agronomy at NTU, suggested that the government should prevent the products from being sold back to Taiwan.

"Taiwan's agricultural market can not bear competition from products grown in China," Kuo said.