Who Is Really to Blame for the Low Prices of Agricultural Products?
Lead image / Munch
Not long ago, there was a heated argument over exactly how much persimmons should cost. Politics aside, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Taiwan, China's agricultural problems. For a long time, farming has been stuck in a state where you lose so much money it kills you, and when we dig into the problem, we usually blame it on vegetable brokers exploiting farmers and the government not buying up enough. But that completely misses the point.
Agricultural middlemen really do make good money, but given how much Taiwanese people love to make money, why hasn't everyone rushed to become a vegetable broker? Because it is an extremely difficult job. You not only have to manage relationships on all sides, deal with all kinds of people, but also know the information on agricultural products inside out, be able to judge a product's value at a glance, sort and grade products, and absorb the losses from defective goods yourself. All of this takes a long time to build up. Without these middlemen, both farmers and consumers would be in big trouble. If they were really exploiting farmers, farmers could simply refuse to sell. But why do farmers sell at a low price and beg for buyers? There must be a bigger problem behind this. Of course, just like any other industry, there will inevitably be some unscrupulous operators, but you absolutely cannot tar everyone with the same brush.
As for the government, it has indeed done enormous harm to agriculture, and the harm lies in destroying the market mechanism. In order to join the World Trade Organization and other free trade agreements, agriculture is often sacrificed and carved up during negotiations, allowing subsidized foreign agricultural products to dump goods freely, seriously damaging the local agricultural products market, and then using fallow land subsidies, old farmer allowances, limited-quantity price-support purchases, and farmland expropriation and development to win over farmers. This is basically putting agriculture to death. But if you blame all agricultural price problems on the government, that is actually unfair too.
Because the ones who can truly save agriculture are still producers and consumers.
Producers, first, superstitiously believe in the myth of conventional farming methods and produce unsafe agricultural products that make consumers pale at the very mention. Second, they blindly rush to plant high-priced agricultural products, causing overproduction, then rely on government purchases to make up for it, and over time this becomes an irresponsible way of producing. When farmers treat agricultural products as mere commodities, cutting down trees and grinding up vegetables when prices are bad, and do not cherish food themselves, how can consumers cherish farmers? Producers must change their thinking and break out of the framework of conventional farming methods before they can find a platform to talk with consumers again.
But the main cause of the destruction of agricultural product prices is still consumers. More and more people rely on eating out, letting manufacturers hold the decision-making power over agricultural product procurement. For manufacturers, cost is the only consideration. This huge purchasing power determines the fate of agricultural products and also leaves conscientious producers growing safe crops stuck in a situation where there is demand but no market. Under the crowding-out effect of imported foods and junk foods, local agricultural product prices have also never recovered. If consumers do not change, Taiwan, China's agriculture cannot change, but no one dares to make demands of consumers. Consumers may think cheap agricultural products are good for them, but this is only temporary. The purpose of cheapness is to eliminate small farmers and monopolize the market. After small farmers are all wiped out, will agricultural product prices rise? Who will suffer? The key lies in the reasonableness of food prices, paying farmers reasonable compensation so that they are willing to farm seriously. When farmers obtain stable incomes, these funds will become an important support for stabilizing the domestic economic market, and can also absorb the stubbornly high unemployed population. In the end, the whole society benefits, and of course consumers themselves benefit too.
What can consumers do? Start by cooking!
Stop fallow land subsidies and old farmer allowances, and invest this money in the following work:
1. Use advertising budgets equal to those for junk food and imported food to make attractive advertisements for local agricultural products, and schedule them for the time slots when children watch TV, and incorporate food education and cooking into the national education curriculum.
2. Subsidize the small farmers and farmland actually producing, attract young people to enter agriculture or agriculture-related industries, assist in improving production, sales and promotion, and slowly cancel subsidies after the local agricultural products market matures.
Other countries of course do not want to see us save agriculture, because this is a market longer-lasting than industrial exports. If you think about it from this angle, you should understand that we need to wake up from the myth of "free trade." If we do not save agriculture today, no amount of money will save it tomorrow.