Taiwan Agriculture News president Wang Longzong's public-interest lecture at the "Hong Junpei Culture and Education Foundation"

(Taiwan Business News) Taiwan's farmers rely mainly on selling primary agricultural products for their income, which has led to a low willingness among young people to enter agriculture. Taiwan possesses outstanding agricultural technology, yet neglecting agricultural technology - an important tool that can create value for Taiwan's agriculture and raise farmers' incomes - has created a situation of "holding a golden rice bowl while begging for food." On June 7, the Hong Junpei Culture and Education Foundation and Taiwan Business News invited Taiwan Agriculture News president Wang Longzong to speak on "Agricultural Development and Social Progress." Drawing on his many years of experience and background in running media, President Wang shared his insights, and the audience benefited greatly.

Faced with global climate change, food production continues to decline, and the problem of uneven wealth distribution means people starve to death somewhere in the world every day. Taiwan is founded on agriculture and is a region abundant in food production, but many fertile farmlands have now been converted to building land - a consequence of short-sighted pursuit of quick profits by Taiwan, the government, and landowners.

Taiwan Agriculture News president Wang Longzong's public-interest lecture: Taiwan's agricultural technology is the envy of the world

The main reasons for Taiwan's excessively high agricultural production costs come from inappropriate land policy and tolerance of exploitation by upstream and downstream players. As long as the government is willing to seriously confront these policies and man-made manipulations and actively resolve them, Taiwan's agriculture can still have a very good chance at sustainable development. (National spatial planning)

On the one hand, Taiwan's agriculture should upgrade and transform to build international competitiveness - a policy the government has continually promoted - yet in practice it still uses traditional thinking to confine Taiwan's agriculture mainly to selling primary agricultural products, while ignoring how Taiwan's technology and R&D innovation energy could produce high-value products. Speaking with the concern of a president of an agriculture newspaper, Wang Longzong said that cheap raw materials are not enough to build the reputation of MIT, but technology and creativity can add value to MIT. If agricultural value-added is removed from the demonstration zones, it means removing Taiwan's opportunities to develop its agriculture internationally. (Agricultural exports)

Faced with trade liberalization, Taiwan should treat its quality agricultural technology and innovation energy as its strongest backing, turning imported agricultural products that might otherwise pose a threat into a value-added niche for agriculture, and using Taiwan brands to enter the global market. The ornamental fish industry has developed into an important local industry in Pingtung and still holds a competitive advantage, but because the number of fish species it breeds itself is limited, it is hard to maintain a leading position. If foreign fish species could be imported, combined with domestic industries such as fish tanks and fish feed, Taiwan could become the Asia-Pacific aquarium operations center, with output value expected to increase 5-fold. Industry players worry that if this platform cannot be established within 2 years, mainland China will take its place.

In addition, the Council of Agriculture is promoting adjustment of the agricultural industry, with "local production, local consumption" to consolidate the domestic market, using multiple measures at once. These include promoting agricultural product safety certification labels, the Taiwan Rice label, and mandatory labeling of frozen and chilled chicken and pork, in order to clearly distinguish imported from domestic products and secure the market for domestic agricultural products.

Furthermore, many people argue that Taiwan's agricultural production costs are too high and that it cannot survive without massive government subsidies, and therefore, after joining the WTO, they have openly or implicitly advocated giving up on Taiwan's agriculture. Such arguments do not examine carefully whether the causes of Taiwan's high agricultural production costs are man-made, or whether policy measures could guide them downward, and thus appear to be hasty conclusions.

Wang Longzong said that in all countries around the world, as the degree of industrialization rises, the value of agricultural output relative to average social income becomes lower and lower. Therefore, agriculture in all developed countries needs various government subsidy measures to support rural incomes, yet it is still difficult to avoid the problems of a shrinking agricultural population and an aging agricultural population (with descendants unwilling to continue farming). Taiwan is no exception. However, the EU and Japan face more serious problems in this regard than our country, yet their responses have been far more effective than ours. That is because, in addition to the aforementioned problems, Taiwan's agriculture faces an extra difficulty: each farming household's farmland is too small, while farmland property rights and rental prices are too high.

For Taiwan's agriculture to be sustainable, the first prerequisite is that farming households' incomes must keep pace with the average income of society as a whole; otherwise, the number of people willing to farm will naturally decline year by year. However, under the WTO framework, the prices of agricultural products cannot be kept as high as in the past era of guaranteed-price purchasing because they must compete with foreign products. If farmers' incomes are to be raised or maintained despite falling prices, the area of cultivated land must be moderately expanded.

At present, Taiwan's farmland property rights have become fragmented due to inheritance, so that the vast majority of farming households own less than one jia of cultivated land. Because the farmland property rights problem is very difficult to solve, expanding the cultivated land per farming household must rely on renting. However, the current guaranteed-price purchasing and fallow-land subsidy policies drive up land rents, making it infeasible to expand the scale of production area to increase each farming household's income. Under such circumstances, even with intensive cultivation, excellent agricultural technology, and advantageous climate, unless the output value per unit area could be dozens of times that of European countries and nearly two hundred times that of American farming households, each farming household's agricultural income would still appear extremely meager.

Taiwan has a high population density, a severe shortage of urban building land, and short distances between urban and rural areas, so that all farmland is sold as "quasi-urban building land." The above problems have accumulated over many years, and behind them lie complex political and commercial interests that cannot be changed overnight. However, successive government leaders have been afraid to face the problems; even though there were 11 years during the membership application process to plan ahead for countermeasures, they still failed to actively plan and lay out a strategy. Today agriculture already faces a crisis of survival, so there is really no reason not to actively eliminate abuses and open a new chapter.

"Our agricultural technology is the envy of the world!" Wang Longzong said with great confidence. Taiwan has several thousand master's and doctoral holders in agricultural research manpower, researching new varieties of vegetables and fruits, rice, pigs, and ducks every day, and can even successfully breed Kudat seahorses and clownfish artificially; it is also ahead of the world in successfully breeding the largest medium-sized fluorescent fish. In new varieties, new technologies, and new products released in recent years, one sees R&D personnel exercising creativity to turn agricultural waste into valuable health foods and cosmetic skincare products, and also learns how new cultivation methods can make fruit larger and sweeter and rice more fragrant and delicious.

Taiwan Agriculture News president Wang Longzong profile

President Wang Longzong has served as a reporter and director of the Minzhong Daily Taipei County bureau, deputy president of the Minzhong Daily head office, president of the Minzhong Daily capital branch, deputy president of the Youth China Morning Post, and president of the Minzhong Daily Taipei branch, among other posts; he currently serves as president of Taiwan Agriculture News, chairman of the Minzhong Forum News, chairman of the Caishen Weekly, chairman of the Chinese Red Art Culture Exchange Association, and head of the Taipei news volunteer group of the Hong Junpei Culture and Education Foundation, among other posts.

Hong Junpei Culture and Education Foundation 2014 public-interest lecture