Green That's Hard to Recreate: The Field Green We Can't Go Back To

Pesticide residue has been detected in Fuli brown rice. Just as with the Yinchuan rice incident a few years ago, crops marketed as non-toxic and organic keep running into problems, especially in the clean, unspoiled east with its fine mountains and waters, leaving people wondering which link in the chain has gone wrong.

In its early days, Fuli Rice built its brand on being the first batch of Taiwanese rice to be exported to Japan again after a 30-year interruption in rice exports to Japan. It also saw how Japanese buyers used credit agencies to secretly investigate farmers' cultivation practices, and the strict spirit of testing rice bag by bag.

Now that the brand-building Fuli Rice has run into trouble, it is surprising, and a detailed investigation is needed into which item has gone wrong: the production method, contamination from neighboring fields, milling and processing, bagging and packaging, or the residue testing procedure.

But behind a single news story, it is not just one rice producer with a quality problem; it reflects changes in the eastern agricultural production areas, raising worries that the eastern farmland, Taiwan's last grain base, is beginning the first chapter of a major collapse.

But once eastern farmland follows the western farmland path of heavy fertilizer and excessive pesticides, land degradation, or soaring land rents that shut out new farmers, or even tourism development that devours farmland, the eastern agricultural areas will all head toward a crisis of disappearance.

Pesticide residue detected in rice is no longer a simple testing issue; rather, the government must seriously think about the preservation and planning of the eastern agricultural areas, designate large areas of organic production zones in suitable areas with independent water sources, and in an era when the very mention of toxins causes alarm, guide farmers to transition or new farmers to enter, promote organic cultivation, and even reduce scattered private development and officially promoted BOT projects that destroy farmland, so as to keep the eastern land naturally green.

The east is a pure land, the dream land of many organic farmers, and also Taiwan's precious grain base. From one news event, we should think even more about the big questions behind the news.