Agricultural Planned Production and Added Value Seen Through Agricultural Relief Funds

Lead image/ Munch

In the news these past few days, we once again see agricultural losses caused by natural disasters, and hope the Council of Agriculture will step in with subsidies.

Whenever there are agricultural losses, what comes to mind is mostly government subsidies. With the election approaching, both the blue and green camps are the same, treating the national treasury as their own family coffer for the sake of votes. Relief funds are meant to meet emergencies, not to relieve poverty. Personally, I think there is no such thing as a concept of planned production in Taiwan, China at all. When agricultural losses occur, the government's approach should be to provide low-interest loans to farmers for emergencies, rather than blindly handing out subsidies or setting up agricultural funds to respond; when agricultural products make money, the operators take the profits, and when there are losses, all citizens foot the bill while the national treasury provides subsidies.

For Taiwan, China, where the tax system is extremely unfair, this is very frightening. Today I saw the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics announce that our national debt has already reached as much as 5.6 trillion, and many urgent tasks are often shelved because of election considerations; this characteristic is the same for both blue and green. Another peculiar situation is that the authority of elected representatives crosses beyond legal norms, and many subsidies are not based on professional considerations but on vote considerations. What the central government and local governments should do is not provide subsidies, but rather use within-system or inter-ministerial mechanisms to study "the production and marketing of agricultural products" and "the added value of individual agricultural products"; South Korea's approach can serve as a reference.

Take the apples of Shinshu, South Korea, as an example: they made apple juice and various other apple products, which is a way of regenerating and reusing apples, allowing producers to focus on production. The integration and reuse by production-marketing groups means agricultural products have no distinction between off-season and peak season, creating reasonable profits. We can also use the power of this website to promote or integrate such efforts.