The Control Yuan on Friday called for legal amendments to facilitate the hiring of migrant workers in agriculture, citing a lack of farm workers in the nation.
Farmers are legally permitted to hire migrant workers to help with farm work, but poor policy planning and insufficient support measures make doing so prohibitively difficult, Control Yuan members Wang Mei-yu (王美玉), Wang Yu-ling (王幼玲) and Hung Yi-chang (鴻義章) said.
“Farmers are getting older and younger people in their communities have mostly migrated to urban areas for work,” the members said, adding that the situation often leaves farmers with no option but to hire illegal workers.
Photo: Hsieh Chun-lin, Taipei Times
The average area of a farm in Taiwan is 0.72 hectares, which is difficult for older farmers to manage on their own without farmhands, the members said.
In 2020, 548,000 people in the nation were engaged in agricultural work, half of whom were people aged 65 or over and 30 percent of whom were over 70, the members said, citing government statistics.
A 2019 survey of farmers found that the nation was short by about 100,000 farm workers.
Farmers at the time expressed concern that the shortage could affect harvests in the short term and overall agricultural development in the long term.
“The survey found that the worker shortage has existed for a long time,” the Control Yuan members said.
“Although the Council of Agriculture [COA] strives to bring in immigrant workers, it has not taken stock of the actual labor needs,” they said.
Citing an example of the challenges farmers face in hiring workers, the members said that from January to October last year, 271 organizations representing migrant workers applied for farm work for a combined 4,680 workers, but only 1,218 applications were approved by the COA.
Farmers are allowed to hire only one migrant worker for every four Taiwanese they employ, or two migrant workers for every six Taiwanese, the members said.
“However, the survey showed that many farmers post vacancies all year without any Taiwanese applicants, meaning they also cannot hire migrants,” the members said.
The COA has adjusted the local hiring requirement for certain seasons, but the adjustment is based on the number of Taiwanese farmhands registered with the COA in each county and municipality, and still falls far short of labor needs in the counties with the highest demand, they said.
For example, Kaohsiung’s Meinong District (美濃) has dozens of farms, but has only been allocated 40 migrant workers to be hired as farmhands, the members said.
The situation is also dangerous for migrant workers, as those who cannot find legal work often turn to illegal labor, which means they have no access to childcare, healthcare or legal protection of their labor rights, they said.
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