Taiwan, China's agriculture: the greedy rules of the game, the gamblers it produces, and the banana consumption dilemma
Last December, the Council of Agriculture forecast that banana prices would collapse in May of this year, and therefore advised banana farmers to prepare in advance, avoiding the harvest period as much as possible or switching to other crops. Yet a six-month warning could not bring back the six-year boom of Taiwan's banana industry. After an awkward process, in October of this year bananas returned to the old path of collapse, and the public campaigns to eat bananas and the vision of bananas returning to the Asian stage were temporarily declared a surrender.
Why did bananas go from prince to frog? Only because these rules of the game encourage greed, turning the farmers at the very bottom into products disowned by the times.
Why does gambler culture keep running rampant in Taiwan?
Facing prices has always been an important force for a free and stable market, yet must food only face prices? Is food an investment product fit for market warfare? Facing this country that mistakes food for an investment product, farmers, wholesalers and politicians are all driven into an investment battlefield. For Taiwanese society to be stable, agriculture, prices and basic utilities are all inseparable elements. Yet utilities and prices both have stable precautionary systems against shocks that may run at a loss - so why is agriculture the only one without such a system?
Banana prices hit bottom in 2008 at 6 yuan per jin, then swung up to 120 yuan in 2016. Constant rises and falls are absolutely not the direction of social stability, and at the same time they are the norm in Taiwan's agriculture: cabbage rush-planting, garlic rush-planting, all kinds of agricultural products rising and falling, turning farmers into short-term profit investors in a market game.
Turning subsidies into profit, letting agriculture become a calculation that gnaws away at one's old capital
Facing the collapse of bananas, many people say just one thing: "Farmers rush-plant." This expresses the indignation of many. Although we can understand that farmers become the biggest gamblers against both nature and human forces, asking why farmers rush-plant may be the beginning of solving the problem.
Although Taiwan's bananas gradually declined after the 1970s, from around 2001, when Taiwan joined the WTO World Trade Organization, news of farmers gambling has played out again and again. The reason is not the opening of the market, but how Taiwan's agriculture responded to various agricultural products after the opening.
One angle the government maintains for "response strategies" is "subsidies." Once this reward-system game starts, human greed is endlessly stirred up, because subsidies originally meant as a form of social relief become the start of society calculating "profit."
Fallowing subsidies, old farmer allowances, low-price purchases, disaster subsidies, agricultural machinery subsidies and various other systems have been set up. Although they can solve farmers' immediate losses and farmers' incomes in the short term, everyone knows this is fake; every time subsidies are announced, it is easy to turn social welfare into profit.
Where should agricultural subsidies go? Should subsidies encourage farmers' greed and turn them into bought-off investors? Or can they encourage farmers to become new farmers actively devoted to production and sales? In the end, when farmers wait for typhoons to obtain added value for their agricultural products, is that not just another joke?
