The road to wheat revival in Taiwan, China requires everyone's participation

Photo / Kuo Chih-jung

In 2007, consumer prices soared. A 22-kg bag of flour shot up from 600 yuan to 800 yuan. "I don't dare buy bread anymore!" "At this rate we won't make any money!" Complaints from the public and from operators in flour-related industries rose one after another; but the government could offer no concrete, positive supporting measures in response, and could only let wheat prices rise and fall at will. The root cause is that Taiwan depends entirely on imported wheat.

Dependence on imports means control rests in the hands of the exporting countries.

After globalization took hold, Argentina, the United States, Australia and other countries became major wheat exporters worldwide, and Taiwan relied heavily on American wheat in particular. But because global climate change caused droughts, Argentina's wheat output fell steadily from 16.4 million tonnes a year. On top of that, oil production declined year by year, an energy crisis loomed, and the cost of imports and exports also became a factor limiting exports. In 2007, Taiwan faced a food crisis because of the energy crisis. The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that every 1 degree of warming would harm low-latitude countries; once warming exceeded 3 degrees, agriculture worldwide would suffer significant negative effects.

When wheat prices soared, Wen Tsu-kang of the Council of Agriculture's Planning Division wrote an article titled "A Discussion of Record-High Wheat Prices and Their Related Impacts." Wen pointed out that abnormally dry and hot weather reducing global wheat output, and rising international oil prices increasing transport costs, were both pressures driving up prices in wheat-importing countries; although wheat is not Taiwan's main food crop, its output over the past 10 years had been less than 300 tonnes and its planted area under 100 hectares, yet after dietary habits changed and consumption of wheat-based foods rose, Taiwan had to import more than 1 million tonnes of wheat every year.

At the time, Wen did not think Taiwan should respond to its dependence on imported wheat by expanding planted area to raise output; instead he suggested "taking this opportunity to promote rice-eating culture, so that citizens can respond to the trend of rising wheat prices by changing their dietary habits." But Taiwan's farmers and those concerned about agriculture did not see it that way, and a wave of a Taiwan wheat revolution was rising across the island.

A new wave of the wheat revolution is rising in places across Taiwan, breaking free of the predicament of Taiwan's total dependence on imported wheat

Wheat prices soar, and farmers suffer too

Late spring 2010. By rights, Great Cold had long passed, and farmers had already finished preparing their fields and begun spring plowing. But in Yuanli Township, known as the "granary of Miaoli," several plots still had not been planted with rice seedlings. These plots sit near the Shanshui Organic Rice Farm, which produces excellent Koshihikari rice; most farmers here cooperate with the farm to grow rice, but starting in 2009 the farmers began a new experiment beyond rice - on these plots, golden wheat ears were swaying!

"Remember 2007?" asked Wu Shui-chih, a farmer born in the 47th year of the Republic of China calendar who had farmed since elementary school, holding a cup of hot tea at the simple "meeting place" set up beside the field. "That year a 22-kg bag of wheat actually sold for 800 yuan!" Wu said that most village farmers kept chickens, and the feed was oatmeal, and wheat prices had soared shockingly, so he thought: "Our family's fields used to grow wheat too, so I might as well grow it myself! It doesn't matter if the amount is small - at least I can feed the chickens!"

And so, after discussing it many times with neighboring farmers at the simple meeting place, Wu Shui-chih rallied eight farmers including himself to grow wheat together. Taiwan had not grown wheat in large quantities for decades; because farmers generally no longer planted it, even the agricultural research institutes no longer developed wheat; while rice had a price-support purchasing policy, wheat growing lacked policy encouragement - so why were these Yuanli farmers, whose ages added up to more than 500 years, growing wheat?

Wu Shui-chih said bluntly: "The government isn't looking after farmers! It keeps compromising with the United States!" He was talking not only about the way cheap grain hurt farmers after Taiwan joined the WTO, but about the improper policies from much earlier that made Taiwan abandon coarse grain cultivation and led to the food crisis.

Toast at breakfast shops, cakes at bakeries, noodle stalls on the corner... looking around, Taiwanese people's daily reliance on flour had long since far surpassed rice. But about 3 years earlier, only Daya Township in Taichung County grew wheat anywhere in Taiwan, on about 70 hectares; yet that wheat was not for Taiwanese people to eat, but supplied to the Kinmen Distillery as seed wheat. Compared with Taiwan's wheat field area decades ago, today's wheat fields are extremely scarce.

Birds visit the wheat fields; though they cause crop losses, the farmers insist on friendly farming and will not poison living creatures

Taiwan's wheat road

After the wheat crisis broke out in 2007, Shih Ming-huang, general "and concurrent" manager of the Happiness Bread Bakery, also found bread production difficult because of soaring raw material prices, realized the danger of relying on imports, and thus conceived the idea of promoting wheat and "making bread with Taiwan wheat."

Shih, who came from an engineering background, had thrown himself into work at the Happiness Bread Bakery for people with learning disabilities, and after the 2007 oil crisis he was among the first to cooperate with Daya in Taichung to grow wheat. But at first they could only grow 2 tonnes of wheat. The biggest problem with such a small quantity was that it could not be milled, because it was not cost-effective for flour mills.

Chen Cheng-chang, vice president of Chiafa Flour Mill, admitted frankly that handling wheat is a cumbersome process, and if the wheat is not handled well after harvest, just getting the wheat clean is more troublesome than milling it. Most people do not know that before wheat is milled it must be cleaned before it can be ground; "if the wheat has iron, stones or sparks, the flour mill will explode"; and after milling it is only a semi-finished product that still has to be blended.

Chen Cheng-chang explained: "A single wheat kernel takes 40 minutes to go through the whole process, and the powder has to be divided into 58 layers." So when Shih Ming-huang first asked him to mill the flour, he could not agree. In the end Shih bought his own milling machine and relied on himself to finish milling the wheat.

After this experience, Shih Ming-huang felt that more people should be found to grow wheat together, and at present farmers in Daya in Taichung, Xuejia in Tainan, Yuanshan in Yilan, Yuanli in Miaoli and Fangyuan in Changhua all have contract-growing arrangements with him. Farmer Wu Wen-hsiung admitted frankly that for farmers "planting one more crop means one more income," and quite a few farmers in Yuanli alone were eager to try. Yet several of the contract farmers also admitted frankly: "Growing wheat is still at the experimental stage." The reason is that there are still many things to overcome in growing wheat in Taiwan.

Wu Shui-chih recalled his own first growing experiment: "A complete failure - the seeds soaked in water too long and simply did not sprout"; other farmers planted using the straw-mulch method, but because the area grows Koshihikari rice, there was very little grass, and the wind blew the straw stems away at once, so that too was declared a failure. Although the farmers refused to give up and tried again and again, because the land they farmed was local Koshihikari rice land that emphasized quality, they used no herbicides or pesticides to grow wheat, and so the wheat suffered bird damage.

"They (sparrows, crested mynas and other birds) will perform on command!" Wu Wen-hsiung ran to the edge of the field ridge and clapped hard a few times, and thousands of small birds flew out of the wheat field. I marveled at the sight, but he sighed: "Never seen it before, so it's fresh to you? We wish they wouldn't come - half the wheat has been eaten!"

Farmer Li Hsin-wu said that in growing wheat, besides worrying about the weather, he worried even more about bird damage: "Wheat is sown only after the second rice crop, and by the time others are preparing their fields, the wheat field is only then ripening and ready to harvest; the birds are very cunning! They all crowd in here to eat!" Li Hsin-wu said, half angry and half amused: "I don't mean we shouldn't let the birds eat, but they really waste so much!"

Li Hsin-wu broke off a stalk of wheat and explained: "We say wheat has grandpa, grandson and grandma kernels, and the birds eat the biggest ones and let the rest fall to the ground!" Asked how Li Hsin-wu found this out, he answered matter-of-factly: "I patrol the fields with my 'electronic eye' (meaning very carefully)!" Moreover, for the sake of ecology and environmental protection, the farmers do not poison the birds; Li Hsin-wu could only try many methods such as setting off firecrackers to scare the birds, but with half the result for twice the effort. At present the farmers are still trying new methods, hoping to reduce the losses.

Just how great is the impact of birds on farmers' harvests? Taiwan currently lacks research on this.

According to records from the Guandu Nature Park, with no bird scaring at all, about 1/4 of the harvest is affected; with bird scaring it drops to 1/10. However, Ho Yi-hsien, director of the Guandu Nature Park, said that the government's agriculture department currently lacks field experience and can offer only limited help in reducing bird damage, and that it should follow Japan's example in establishing a "bird damage control research institute" to help farmers develop good solutions.

But bird damage is secondary; the biggest problems facing agriculture in Taiwan are still production and marketing and climate. To solve the production and marketing problem, Shih Ming-huang set up a wheat production traceability website for the farmers to make the production process transparent, gradually building a production and marketing platform for the farmers and opening up more possibilities for promoting wheat cultivation.

Li Hsin-wu praised the production traceability website endlessly. "Sowing is simple, but management is difficult. Shih Ming-huang taught us to use computers - whether it's flooding, observation, fertilizing or ripening, it's all set up properly, and he designed it so we can manage it by pressing just one key, just like a deity!" Through the production records, anyone interested in wheat can inquire directly with the farmers, which not only reduces exploitation by middlemen but also lets consumers clearly grasp food safety.

Milling and processing after the wheat harvest - every step is a test

A turning point for rural villages under the water crisis

For this group of farmers in Yuanli, Miaoli, growing wheat is like fighting to prove a point. The 2007 wheat crisis actually made farmers who had grown wheat since childhood unable to bring themselves to buy wheat, "which made us determined to promote coarse grains." Li Hsin-wu believes Taiwan does not need to import every kind of coarse grain, and should grow what it can itself.

The persistence comes from the farmers' clear knowledge that growing wheat not only reduces dependence on imports and eases concerns about a food crisis, but can further sustain rural culture. Li Hsin-wu said bluntly that the people farming in rural areas now are all elderly, and those taking up wheat growing again are all elderly too, "I hope there will be a chance for young people to come and farm." Li Hsin-wu said Taiwan is a treasure island where whatever you plant grows, and the government should not encourage only industry while leaving young people unable to farm and letting rural villages disappear.

Rural villages were mostly poor in the past because they had to depend on the heavens for a living. But with rapidly advancing technology, the impact of climate on farming can perhaps be minimized. Lai Chung-wei, an analyst at Weather Risk Management Co., said that because the Central Weather Bureau is a government unit, its duties lean toward general weather and disaster-type forecasts; although it also issues basic agricultural weather forecasts, weather forecasts mostly focus on cities and flat land, while crops are mostly in the suburbs, and terrain also produces variations, making them hard to manage.

At present Weather Risk Management Co. is cooperating with the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and in the future will launch a "digital farmers' almanac," where farmers can log in online to register their products and farming conditions. Lai Chung-wei explained that the digital farmers' almanac is being developed mainly because farmers used to farm by the 24 solar terms, but since the farmers' almanac was formulated for the Yellow River basin and Taiwan lies farther south in latitude, it is not entirely accurate; combined with major climate change, it is necessary to create a farmers' almanac exclusive to Taiwan.

In the future the digital farmers' almanac will make long-term and short-term forecasts. Lai Chung-wei said that because crops have schedules, including spraying, irrigation, fertilizing and spraying, and these farming tasks are all related to weather, in the future farmers can register their farming tasks online and the weather risk management company will annotate weather forecasts for them, so farmers can save costs at the right times.

However, climate risk management can only assist a small part of Taiwan's agriculture. Under extreme climate change, drought may become the norm, and improving Taiwan's agricultural problems still depends on policy. Yet Taiwan's agriculture constantly faces the problem of industry grabbing its water, and overcoming this is fraught with difficulty.

Liao Pen-chuan, associate professor in the Department of Real Estate and Built Environment at National Taipei University, believes: "If Taiwan has a future, it must lie in agriculture." Liao pointed out that the Water Resources Agency of the Ministry of Economic Affairs keeps declaring publicly that Taiwan is severely short of water resources and therefore needs to build reservoirs and develop water sources in multiple ways. "But in fact Taiwan's water resource use is out of control!"

Although the Water Resources Agency says the new thinking on water resources should be to determine demand by supply. But determining demand by supply means the Water Resources Agency must know how much water it can control and how much demand there is, "but often we do not know how much supply there is, yet we clearly have endless demand." What Liao Pen-chuan refers to is precisely the crisis of endlessly developing industry and demanding new water sources; behind it lies the even more hidden problem of industry forcing the diversion of agricultural water and forcing farmers to fallow their land.

With farmland fallowed and farmers short of income, large tracts of intact land then become the object of industry's covetous eyes once again. Yang Feng-jung, deputy director-general of the Water Resources Agency, stated clearly at the 2010 National Rivers NGO Conference that by around 2031, industrial water use would still increase to 63 percent of the 2001 level, while agricultural water use would decrease.

Industrial development has become Taiwan's only development policy; after water restrictions, farmland is fallowed, which affects not only agricultural production and farmland ecology but also farmers' very survival, further causing rural decline. If agriculture and industry are to coexist, keeping the fields and actively using water sources will be the way out. Li Hung-yuan, a professor in the hydraulic engineering group of the Department of Civil Engineering at National Taiwan University, has stressed repeatedly that Taiwan will face alternating droughts and floods in the future, that water shortages in the southwest will become more severe, and that the proportion of agricultural water use needs to be reconsidered.

The 2010 rivers NGO conference also pointed out that to cope with the innate limitation of uneven temporal and spatial distribution of rainfall, and to respond to the acquired problem of fallowing due to the WTO, it is necessary, from the perspective of spatial management, to improve water rights, hardware facilities, crop improvement and even governance mechanisms according to local conditions. Among these, saving water use by changing the crops grown strikes exactly at the core of Shih Ming-huang's promotion of wheat cultivation.

Growing drought-tolerant wheat can save water use

Agricultural policy in need of reform

However, although Taiwan's farmers are willing to grow wheat again, and have a certain level of skill and a suitable environment, they have always lacked strong support from the agriculture authorities.

The government's passivity is most obvious in the supply of seed wheat for promoting wheat. Chang Wen-yen, village chief of Daya in Taichung, had grown wheat ever since he left the military, supplying it to Puli and the Taichung Distillery, but because of imported alcohol, the planted area suddenly fell by 1/10; now only Kinmen still has 1,400 hectares of wheat fields used as seed wheat. Chang Wen-yen said the current wheat variety is suitable as a distilling starter, and although it can also be eaten, its flour yield is relatively low. Shih Ming-huang once sought cooperation with an agricultural improvement station, but was refused.

So Chang Wen-yen is now actively studying whether durum wheat can be grown in Taiwan, and is also inquiring with Uni-President Enterprises about the possibility of growing barley. However, Chang Wen-yen pointed out that the first and second rice crops already strain the soil fertility, and growing wheat in between requires applying a lot of chemical fertilizer to succeed.

Shen Hsun, a technician at the Taichung Agricultural Improvement Station, said that the soil fertility problem Chang Wen-yen worries about, as well as the problem of the time gap between rice and wheat for farmers, can actually be solved by "planting only the first rice crop, not the second rice crop, but planting one wheat crop"; but because farmers currently all use the straw-mulch method after harvesting the second rice crop instead of preparing the land, if the second rice crop is skipped, farmers growing wheat must plow the field an extra time, and weeds will also be more serious.

The Taichung improvement station had previously promoted a cropping system of planting green manure in the first crop and rice in the second crop. Shen Hsun said that because the best growing season for wheat is between Oct. 25 and Nov. 5, a cropping system mixing green manure and rice could avoid the current situation where farmers sow seed wheat only in late November and easily encounter rain, and not only would yields be higher, even pests and diseases could be minimized. But according to Shen Hsun's understanding, farmers are not very willing to change their thinking, because the wheat-growing areas are mostly high-yield rice areas, and giving up planting one more rice crop would mean a big loss for farmers.

Wu Shui-chih believes that instead of telling farmers to give up growing rice, the Council of Agriculture should provide good improved varieties so that wheat can be harvested earlier. But Shen Hsun said awkwardly that since the 84th year of the Republic of China calendar, because the Monopoly Bureau no longer bought wheat, improvement work had come to a complete halt, and currently no improvement station in Taiwan is doing breeding work.

"Unless policy requires it, the improvement stations will not act; in short, only when those above set policy will we carry out research." Shen Hsun said that if the Council of Agriculture's policy were willing to support it, the Taichung improvement station planned to carry out traditional breeding work with currently imported American wheat together with Taiwan's Taichung Selection No. 2 and No. 34, without genetic modification, and could very quickly produce a wheat variety suitable for making flour.

Shen Hsun further stressed, "Growing wheat in Taiwan has great prospects; as long as we breed anew and develop in the direction of flour, replacing 30 percent of the 120 tonnes of imported wheat would be quite impressive." Although imported foreign wheat is more consistent in quality, Shen Hsun believes that businessmen talk business, and as long as a variety is suitable for milling and can be supplied steadily, businessmen will certainly use Taiwan wheat. But so far the sticking point is that there is simply not enough market, and the Council of Agriculture worries that once it is promoted there will be unsold stock.

Yet the absence of a market is actually a false issue. Shen Hsun tactfully revealed "his own" speculation: "The government will still consider trade issues. We now buy all our wheat from the United States; if we don't buy from it, there will be big problems." He took American beef imports as an example: after joining the WTO system, many agricultural policies have been distorted under international pressure.

Farmers and experts actually have ardent hopes for and remain optimistic about Taiwan wheat. Whether Taiwan will once again see a repeat of the flour price surge in the future truly tests the government's courage and wisdom.