Why do production and sales always collapse, and why do farmers pin their hopes on selling land to turn their fortunes around? How should environmental subsidies be negotiated?
Text/ Lin Lexin Spokesperson of Taiwan Rural Front
After coming into contact with agriculture and rural areas, I often encounter the same two scenes in different places.
Phenomenon one: collapse of production and sales
Many of the farming friends we know all have this complaint. They work hard all year round and grow high-quality agricultural products, but the purchase prices at harvest are generally low, and farmers are often heard lamenting that their agricultural income is so little that "it is not even enough to earn back the labor cost."
Phenomenon two: farmers want to sell land to turn their fortunes around
In the past two years, the Rural Front has often fought alongside farmers in expropriation zones, demanding opposition to expropriation and farming in place. But within these expropriation zones, there is often also a portion of farmers who quite agree with the policy of zone expropriation, believing that continuing to farm has no prospects and wanting to quickly "sell land to turn their fortunes around."
On the surface, the production and sales problem and the expropriation problem are two problems, but to me, the core of these two problems reaches the same destination by different routes, pointing directly to the of farming income being singularized, unstable and low. This is because the income sources of farmers today are overly concentrated in "revenue from selling agricultural products," which causes several problems:
1. Income sources are unstable, worrying about both poor harvests and good harvests
The characteristic of agriculture is that it depends on the weather. If the weather is bad and agricultural production suffers a poor harvest, farmers' income will be greatly reduced. On the contrary, if the weather is favorable and there is a bumper harvest, farmers then have to worry about short-term market oversupply and cutthroat low-price competition.
2. Agricultural production becomes a heavy burden on the environment
Because selling agricultural products is the only source of income, farmers try to grow as much as possible, as large as possible, and as beautiful as possible in order to sell at a good price on the market. But farming methods that pursue profit and lower costs may leave no spare capacity to care about maintaining or restoring agricultural ecology.
In recent years, many friends have also devoted themselves to solving the production and sales problem, for example by buying agricultural products directly from farmers, saving the profit exploitation of layers of middlemen. But "cheap grain hurts farmers, expensive grain hurts the people." If agricultural product prices are raised, lower-income consumers may be unable to enjoy these direct-from-farm products. The production end and the consumption end are like the two sides of a seesaw. Even if middleman exploitation is removed, in an interlocking industrial chain, whether grain is cheap or expensive, one side will always have something to worry about.
Is the production and sales problem really so unsolvable? If it cannot be solved from within production and sales, perhaps we can temporarily step away from production and sales and think about other solutions. Friends in the Rural Front have recently often discussed whether "environmental subsidies" (sometimes called "land-based subsidies" or "agri-environmental payments") could become a new direction for agricultural policy, balancing farmers' income while encouraging land-friendly cultivation.
In short, environmental subsidies are "green subsidies" given to farmers for land-friendly farming behavior. Because friendly farming methods can let the land rest and allow mountains and forests to recover, but may also reduce farmers' income at the same time. The policy purpose of green subsidies is: the income of farmers using friendly farming methods comes not only from selling agricultural products, but is also supplemented by environmental subsidies to mediate and stabilize farmers' income.
Furthermore, the current high price of organic agricultural products is also because there are no environmental subsidies, and consumers and producers bear the full cost of friendly farming. If we agree that food is not merely a commodity and that health is a basic right of people's lives, then using public finances for environmental subsidies is also reasonable.
Perhaps someone will ask, with the country's fiscal deficit currently severe, where will the money come from for environmental subsidies? In fact, each year we have about 10 billion in fallow subsidies, 6 billion in fertilizer merchant subsidies, and 7 to 8 billion in guaranteed-price purchase subsidies. We can gradually adjust these agricultural subsidies that encourage farmers to leave land fallow and encourage farmers to use chemical fertilizers, and transfer them to farmers who truly intend to practice friendly farming, supporting small farmers' livelihoods and sustainable farming methods.
Of course, if such a proposal is to be put into practice, the most difficult part is how to determine what kind of friendly farming method qualifies, how much environmental benefit it can provide, and how much environmental subsidy it is worth. These still require more farming method experiments and basic agricultural research for reference. What kind of friendly farming methods suit Taiwan's terrain and climate? How should they be categorized? How should a fair and simple local subsidy formula be designed? These questions require long-term, detailed and systematic research on Taiwan's agricultural problems before there is any chance of proposing answers. If we are willing to spend ten years, twenty years, or even an entire generation searching for and waiting for this precious answer, Taiwan's agriculture can escape its current and accompany us into the future.
For more information, please refer to the link: "National Agriculture and Farmland Symposium" Rural Front opinion paper