A Local Perspective 2: Creating Socioeconomic Relations of Exchange, Reciprocity and Reproduction
Lead photo credit / Lee Wan-chen
At the Taiwan Community Supported Agriculture Workshop, two speakers - Daycha of the Thai Rice Gods Foundation and Arne, who has long practiced ecological farming in Niger, Africa - shared how agricultural development in their two countries lost land and farming autonomy in the course of heavy commodification, and how each of them responded under the current state of economic development in their own country.
Daycha mentioned that the poverty Thai farmers face today began after the Green Revolution, which set off a chain reaction leading to the loss of farmers' farming autonomy and land ownership. Arne mentioned that farmers in Niger, in the process of planting solely to pursue market demand, turned formerly lush forests into barren land where not a blade of grass grows. And the responses of both Daycha and Arne pointed, by coincidence, to the same things: the importance of "preserving native seeds" and of "planting what suits the land and following nature."
When sharing the difficulties facing Taiwan's agricultural development, Tsai Pei-hui of the Taiwan Rural Front pointed out that under the commercially integrated agricultural production and marketing system (a market operation in which produce is sold through multiple layers of middlemen), Taiwan's farmers can only keep "force-feeding" pesticides to our land, and this operation is making farmers poorer the more they earn; meanwhile, under the policy incentives of fallow-land subsidies and old-age farmer pensions, those who genuinely want to farm find it increasingly difficult to obtain farmland, and agricultural income can no longer supply what a household needs to live on.
From the speakers' sharing that day, the agricultural production and marketing system under commercial operation is the main cause of farmers' poverty. So what kind of path can a "socially integrated agricultural production and marketing system" based on community cooperation (CSA, Community Supported Agriculture) lead us out onto?
Elizabeth Henderson, a driving force behind CSA in the United States, shared the "sliding-scale share payment" system used on her farm, which lets each shareholder propose the amount of the annual share payment according to their own wishes and financial capacity, so that people of different classes can, in this way, enjoy safe food while also ensuring farmers' livelihoods. Elizabeth also mentioned the important spirit of CSA - that under the shared philosophy of trust and sharing, CSA shareholders resist the operating system of industrial exploitation of land and farmers, work together to keep the land in cultivation, and ensure that generation after generation can have safe food.
The experience in East Africa is this: in view of the most severe drought in sixty years this year, land grabs driven by the large export demand for grain from foreign governments and corporations, and governments and banks encouraging more people to replace self-sufficient grain growing with commodity crop cultivation, the region's possible food security precautionary mechanisms have been destroyed, producing the current severe famine in East Africa. In such a situation, a CSA that uses the power of production and marketing cooperation to keep land capable of producing safe food in cultivation and carries out sliding-scale share payments takes on even greater significance: guarding cultivable food land, ensuring food security precautionary mechanisms, and narrowing the gap between rich and poor.
Tsai Pei-hui shared with everyone three possible models of agriculture and the effects of these three models on farmers:
- A commercially integrated agricultural production and marketing system made up of large, medium and small middlemen
- A state-integrated agricultural production and marketing system made up of farmers' associations and middlemen
- A socially integrated agricultural production and marketing system formed through cooperative consumption or farmers' markets
Tsai Pei-hui analyses Taiwan's current agricultural production and marketing system
In Taiwan, many community colleges and related groups have also begun trying to develop CSA, such as the Homemakers United Foundation, which initiated collective purchasing, and local production-and-marketing communities such as Hsinchu, Fushan, the Grain Shareholders Club, farmers' markets, and Edible School. These types of CSA development have all created many inspiring models of cooperation. However, in developing CSA, Taiwan still faces threats such as short-sighted land development and use policies, land fragmentation, plunder of production resources, and competition from large agribusinesses.
Faced with these threats and difficulties in agricultural production and marketing, besides continuing to monitor and resist improper land and agricultural policies, perhaps what will help is to build, within the system, a "socially integrated production and marketing system" as proposed by Tsai Pei-hui, promoting cooperation and joint management among small farmers, enabling small farmers to engage in diversified production to raise their productivity, ensuring environmental protection and food safety, and developing a society-based socioeconomic relationship of exchange, reciprocity and reproduction - one that may help establish a transparent, diverse and decentralized production and marketing system, maintain production that regenerates farming capacity, put food security precautionary mechanisms in place, and preserve rural culture and farming wisdom.
Further reading
All articles in "Friendly Small Farmers. International Connections. Relay Records"