Falling in Love with the Land for 21 Years: Hermit Female Farmer Li Baolian Fights for the Country, Does Her Best, and Leaves the Rest to Heaven and Earth

(Continued from previous article) After 21 years of labor in Lishan, A-Bao, who supports the mountain through farming, was deeply worried about conditions such as Taiwan's farmland being swallowed by development interests and farmers' income being insufficient to make a living, so she set aside her former life of seclusion in the mountains and became a social activist engaged in worldly struggle.

A-Bao believes that when weighed on the WTO scale, Taiwan's staple foods, coarse grains, and other crops indeed lack competitiveness; however, because fruits and vegetables need to be kept fresh, especially locally grown vegetables, they are relatively less threatened by the low prices of imported goods. Therefore, she put forward the demand for "friendly farming." On the one hand, it differs from traditional organic thinking and is a way of acting that takes better care of the Earth; on the other hand, it finds irreplaceable market value for the small-farmer scale. After all, on the scale of the Earth, the shorter the distance from production area to dining table, the more competitive it should be. More importantly, when every consumer consumes with environmental awareness, structural problems of the collective can be solved through changes in the individual.

A-Bao's first spark was lit at Yilan Community College. The "friendly farming" course was run with great vigor and attracted many friends concerned about agriculture. In addition, the "Da Zhai Yuan Friendly Market," held every other week, let local small farmers face consumers in person. When farmers' stories become topics at the dining table, the act of eating no longer stops at satisfying the palate, and there is empathy for those who sweat while growing crops. Coupled with their cooperation with restaurants and schools and soft dialogue with the government, they broadened and deepened consumers' perspectives. A-Bao said that in those years she "seemed to have divine help"; the ideas in her mind were all sparks that directly ignited the key issues in agriculture. Partners worked together to let the wildfire spread for many years, and the Food and Agricultural Education Act and the Environmental Education Act were enacted separately, making Taiwan's civic education more complete.

Establishing the "Guard Yilan Workshop," dedicated to protecting farmland

Liu Guanmiao, a partner who once struggled alongside her in Yilan, said that A-Bao is a person who is strong because she has no desires; because she has no selfish desires, the environmental sustainability she speaks of is all the more persuasive. Another partner, Lai Qingsong, said that A-Bao always walks at the very front of issues. Because she has a strong sense of mission, even though she does not like cooperating, bargaining, or communicating with others, she still forces herself to do so.

A-Bao also calls herself a solitary person. During her years in Yilan, she kept appearing in public because she hoped to share her views with everyone. Agriculture is closely tied to our lives, but this territory has always been coveted by the interests of other industries, and the state does not care that agriculture is sacrificed. "Why can the government make such decisions for us? Because as consumers we do not care, so I have to start with education and awaken consumer awareness," A-Bao said.

On the one hand, she pursued the solid, long-term plan of century-spanning education; on the other hand, there was also a need for a plan to rescue farmland. After all, farmland policy was already beyond cure and could not wait for education to nurse it back to health. As a Yilan native, A-Bao had personally seen in childhood the grand scene of "a thousand rivers with water, a thousand rivers with moonlight." Those paddy fields were Yilan's most beautiful landscape and the living source of her life. But after farmland sales were opened up and regulations on building farmhouses were relaxed, one luxury farmhouse after another grew out of the paddy fields. Farmland disappeared because of "conversion into building land," and the speed was shocking to her. The desire to do something for her hometown led her to establish the "Guard Yilan Workshop," dedicated to protecting farmland.

Protests and petitions, demanding that the government amend laws and control farmhouses

After studying legal provisions in depth, A-Bao knew that the Agricultural Development Act is the basic law, and the Regulations Governing the Construction of Farmhouses on Farmland are subordinate legislation. Although local agencies can enact their own local self-governance laws, they cannot conflict with central government laws and regulations. A-Bao pointed out many ways in which the construction of farmhouses in Yilan "did not conform to central government laws and regulations." For example, farmhouses may only be built by natural persons actually engaged in agricultural production, but civil servants sitting in offices look at farmland ownership certificates and do not conduct on-site inspections of farming conditions.

Another example is that farmhouse construction must not affect agricultural production or rural development, but luxury farmhouses are often built in the middle of fields, cutting farmland into fragments. Agricultural machinery has no space to turn around or operate, which is tantamount to eliminating the possibility of using farmland for agriculture. In addition, since farmhouses must be built by agricultural producers, when a farmhouse is resold, it is only reasonable that the person taking over the farmhouse must also be a farmer, because the house was granted special privileges on the basis of agricultural use. It should not be bought and sold as ordinary real estate, let alone converted for operation as a bed-and-breakfast or restaurant.

But these questions never received a response from the government. The partners, who had originally only wanted to make soft appeals, were forced to protest in the streets, launch petitions, and hold press conferences.