Civil society pushes for an organic agriculture promotion ordinance to avoid food scarcity

According to statistics from the Council of Agriculture, Taiwan, China used 35,000 metric tons of pesticides in 2010. What consumers appear to spend on buying food is in fact largely spent on the costs of petroleum, pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and eating residual pesticides that harm the ecological environment and human health in turn causes illness and consumes national health insurance costs. In view of this, the Yangshan Culture and Education Foundation has actively promoted organic agricultural food production that does not rely on petroleum, and has promoted the legislation of the "Organic Agriculture Promotion Act", so that the government can devote national resources to safeguarding food security.

On March 29 of this year, You Si-kun, Gao Jhi-peng and several other legislators held a press conference calling on the government to face the problems of high oil prices and a low food self-sufficiency rate, and to squarely address the development of organic agriculture by making clear legislation and rolling out policies to guide the current agricultural sector in transitioning to organic.

Lai Ching-sung, an organic smallholder farmer from Yilan, pointed out that most organic production at present is carried out by individual farmers, and the government has no clear policy direction or guidance measures, which indirectly raises the threshold and cost of transitioning to organic production; Chang Mei of Xingjian Village said that organic agriculture cannot grow large because the government does not provide subsidies and guidance, and he hopes the government can listen to the voices of smallholder farmers and that organic legislation can be completed soon, so that organic producers have somewhere to turn.

Several legislators expressed the necessity of organic legislation, and Legislator Chen Ting-fei also proposed several concrete actions, including requiring the Council of Agriculture to immediately begin planning and first gradually reduce subsidies for pesticides and chemical fertilizers and encourage farmers to use organic fertilizers; in addition, the current fallow land subsidies should also be combined with the promotion of organic agriculture, with areas designated, farmland integrated and then given subsidies for fallow land, so that fallow land can be brought back into cultivation after meeting organic standards, and, on the premise of taking farmers' livelihoods into account, agriculture can gradually be transformed into organic production.

※ This article is simultaneously published in Environmental Information Center.