The Road to Wheat Revival: Taiwan, China-Japan News Feature Officially Published
The special feature "The Road to Wheat Revival in Taiwan and Japan" officially went live on April 18. The website is as follows, and everyone is welcome to read it and offer corrections. https://www.newsmarket.com.tw/wheat-report/
Feature Introduction
Taiwan consumes 1.3 million metric tons of wheat a year, almost equal to the total amount of rice grown across the whole island, and more than 99.9% of it comes from imports. According to statistics, in 2013 the local wheat cultivation area was about 169 hectares, with an output of 379 metric tons, and the self-sufficiency rate for local wheat was not even 0.1%.
Rewind to 1930: along the western coastal areas of Taiwan, about 5,000 hectares were planted with wheat, and by 1960 this had reached 25,000 hectares, once setting a historic peak self-sufficiency rate of 13%. After the 1960s, the government, taking the political situation into account, abandoned local wheat and switched to imported American wheat, even halting the improved-seed propagation system in 1968. In 1997 the wheat planting area hit a historic low, with only 20 hectares left under cultivation on the island; later, contract farming linked to Kinmen kaoliang liquor in Taiwan kept a thread of life, and before 2007 about 70 hectares of planting area was maintained.
After 1997, people in Taiwan called out to "revive local wheat cultivation," with the short-term hope of returning 500 hectares to cultivation; in the long term, if it is to be regarded as a food crop worth promoting, it may need to reach a self-sufficiency rate of 1%, that is, a cultivation area of 4,000 hectares.
To climb from below 0.1% to 1%, many people ask: can Taiwan do it? Are the climate conditions suitable? Facing global competition, is it necessary for Taiwan to develop local wheat?
The Wheat Paths of Taiwan and Japan: Similarities and Differences
Surprisingly, Japan and Taiwan once had a similar trajectory. Japan, with a long history of wheat cultivation, also saw its local wheat self-sufficiency rate slide all the way down because of the massive invasion of foreign wheat, reaching a historic low of only 4% in 1973. Even the flour used for traditional udon noodles yielded its place to white wheat imported from Australia, and the flour for ramen and bread was entirely dominated by imported wheat.
However, the Japanese government did not give up on local wheat, investing resources through policy subsidies and breeding research, and Japanese civil society also poured in great effort, joining flour mills, noodle-making workshops, ramen shops, and bakeries to develop and promote products. Fukuoka, the home of ramen, called out that "Fukuoka must have its own wheat" and bred the exclusive variety "Ramai"; Kagawa, the udon prefecture, incubated the "Sanuki no Yume" variety 15 years ago, vowing to take back the "true taste of udon" from Australian white wheat.
"Use the power of your hometown to develop your hometown's characteristics" became the consensus of Japan's wheat revolution. With government and civil society fighting together for 40 years, in 2013 the domestic wheat self-sufficiency rate climbed to 12%, the highest among Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.
In order to explore the process of Japan's wheat revival and provide a reference for Taiwan, NewsMarket and the Jianzhen Environmental Education Foundation jointly planned this news feature. NewsMarket reporters Lin Huizhen and Jian Jiaying began planning and arranging interviews in mid-2014, and then went to Japan in late August for complete interviews.
The interviewees spanned Fukuoka, Kagawa, and Tokyo, visiting agricultural experiment stations, farmers, Japan Agricultural Cooperatives JA, flour mills, noodle-making workshops, noodle shops, and bakers to learn how they break through production cost and weather limitations and implement local production for local consumption; they also visited the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, the Fukuoka Prefectural Government, the Kagawa Prefectural Government, and civil support organizations to discuss the impact of wheat under globalization and ways to respond.
(Although Hokkaido is a major center of wheat cultivation in Japan, because its climate is too different from Taiwan's, its experience is not easy to use as a reference, so Fukuoka and Kagawa, with relatively similar climates, were chosen as the main cases.)
In presenting the feature's structure, we first divide it by region and wheat use into the Fukuoka Ramai chapter, the Kagawa udon chapter, and the domestic wheat bread chapter; separately, we make the changes in Japanese wheat and policy development into their own chapter, and finally return to Taiwan to understand changes in local wheat cultivation and the current results of the revival.