Because the latest figures from the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) show farmers are making little money, while the farming population is ageing, academics say that agriculture can become sustainable only when farmers could earn a reasonable income.
DGBAS figures from 2009 — the statistics for last year are not ready yet — show the average annual income for a farming household dropped to the second-lowest level in 14 years and was only a little higher than in 2002, when Taiwan entered the WTO. In addition, DGBAS figures also show that, in 20 years, the number of farmers above the age of 65 has doubled.
In 2009, the average annual farming household income was NT$872,000 (US$30,000), but only less than NT$220,000 — or 22 percent — of that income came from farming, while non-farming income accounted for about 78 percent — approximately NT$676,000 — of the total annual average income for farming families.
Compared with the average farming household income in 2006, which was about NT$941,000, farming households have suffered a 10 percent drop in income.
Farming families in 2006 earned about 76 percent of the average annual income earned by non--farming families, which was 5 percent more than in 2009. Along with the drop in income, there was also a significant decline in the farming population — by as much as about 50 percent — in the past 20 years.
In 1999, there were 776,000 farmers in Taiwan, but the number dropped by 30 percent to 543,000 in 2009. In 1990, about 4.9 percent of farmers were above 65 years of age, but the number grew to 17 percent in 2009, while the percentage of farmers under the age of 35 dropped from 22.5 percent to 10.4 percent.
Taiwan Rural Front spokeswoman Tsai Pei-hui (蔡培慧), who is an associate professor at Shih Hsin University’s Graduate Institute for Social Transformation Studies, said that not being able to make a reasonable income is the main cause behind the decline in the population of young farmers.
“I can’t even remember how many times the price for a noodle soup has gone up, but the price of scallion has remained the same for a long time,” Tsai said.
She suggested that, if the government could take NT$50 billon out of the Farming Village Renewal Fund — which is about a quarter of the fund — to pay an NT$20,000 monthly stipend for two years for young people to learn -farming skills, there could be at least 20,000 new farmers.
“In Europe and in Japan, governments are making a lot of effort to save agriculture,” National Taiwan University agricultural economics professor Woo Rhung-jieh (吳榮杰) said. “In Japan, farming families even make more money than the average non-farming families.”
He said after becoming WTO members, many countries support their agricultural sectors with “transfer payments,” such as the “environmental subsidy” in Germany, since the market mechanism may not reflect the true value of the agricultural sector.
Agricultural development researcher Tu Yu (杜宇) said: “The government should make raising farmers’ income from farming a policy objective, so that farmers don’t have to do other jobs to sustain themselves.”
He went on to say that there should be some visionary policies for farmers, not only compensation.
COSTLY TECH FAILURE: More than 25,000 files for nearly 8,000 students from 81 schools were lost when system administrators updated a server, the Ministry of Education said The academic records of 7,854 high-school students have been lost due to a hard-drive failure, the Ministry of Education said yesterday. The records were being stored at National Chi Nan University, which was commissioned by the ministry’s K-12 Education Administration to host a computer server of student portfolios that universities could access to evaluate their applications. Under a program introduced in 2019 for high-school students starting that year, students are to create portfolios to be used for university applications, which include their grades, extracurricular activities and other information related to their character and achievements. System administrators discovered that files were missing when rebooting
921 EARTHQUAKE: The magnitude 7.3 quake left 2,456 people dead and 10,718 injured, while 53,661 houses were fully destroyed and 53,024 houses damaged The Central Weather Bureau yesterday received about 50,000 views on Facebook after it posted the data that it collected on Sept. 21, 1999, when the nation was devastated by a magnitude 7.3 earthquake. The data showed that the 921 Earthquake hit the nation at 1:47am, with the epicenter being 7km southwest of the bureau’s quake detection center in Nantou County’s Yuchi Township (魚池) at a depth of 8km. The quake left 2,456 people dead and 10,718 injured, while 53,661 houses were fully destroyed and 53,024 houses damaged, with the cost of the damage estimated at NT$300 billion (US$10.8 billion at the current
CONFUSING RESULTS: A New Taipei City worker tested positive for COVID-19 in a rapid test and a PCR test, but negative in a traditional nucleic acid test, the CECC said Travelers from Bangladesh, Brazil and Peru are no longer required to quarantine at a government center, and from Saturday can choose to quarantine at hotels, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday. The three nations are no longer considered “key high-risk countries,” as their COVID-19 case numbers have continued to fall, the CECC said, adding that no travelers from these countries have been confirmed to be infected with COVID-19 in the past two months. The revised classification would allow travelers from the three countries to choose where they stay during their mandatory 14-day quarantine, although they would be required to pay
‘TECHNICALITY’: The full moon was at 7:55am, but the Taipei Astronomical Museum said it technically remained a ‘real’ full moon when it rose again at night The Mid-Autumn Festival had a “real” full moon, the first time the astronomical categorization has fallen on the day of the festival since 2013, the Taipei Astronomical Museum said yesterday. The festival, which falls on the 15th day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar — which this year was yesterday — does not always coincide with an exact full moon, the museum said. A full moon occurs when the Earth is between the sun and the moon — or, more precisely, when the ecliptic longitudes of the sun and the moon differ by 180° — which has a cycle of
RSS