Domestic soybean production doubles, but can sales keep up?

According to statistics from the Agriculture and Food Agency of the Council of Agriculture, over the past 3 years the cultivation area of domestically grown soybeans has doubled, rising from 862 hectares in 2013 to 2078 hectares, while production grew from 1810 metric tons to 4363 tons. Although this is a huge difference compared with the 2.618 million metric tons of imported soybeans, there has already been significant growth in the domestic edible bean market.

The outlook for soybeans is highly promising. With policy subsidies for reactivating fallow land, more farmers are eager to give it a try, but can sales keep up with production?

Big manufacturers are interested in cooperating, but production must be integrated

Imported non-GMO soybeans from abroad are priced between 20 and 30 yuan per kg, while black beans are slightly higher by 5 yuan, and Taiwan-grown soybeans are more than 2 times higher, affecting manufacturers' willingness to purchase. The main reason prices struggle to compete is that Taiwan's production scale is small; land acquisition costs and harvesting costs are relatively higher than abroad, making price competitiveness somewhat weaker.

Although the price is high, under the trend of "eating local," many manufacturers in recent years have wanted to use domestic soybeans, but production is far from enough to meet market demand. Weng Chen-hsin, Chief Secretary of the Agriculture and Food Agency, said frankly that the Agriculture and Food Agency had also approached major food manufacturers, hoping to help promote soy milk products made from domestic soybeans, "but they want several hundred or several thousand tons a year, and no one in Taiwan can supply that much, so what can you do?" Therefore, at this stage the problem is not that there is nowhere to sell, but that the volume has not yet reached market efficiency.

Farmer Tsai Yi-hung said the Agriculture and Food Agency should actively play the role of integrating soybean volumes, because it is impossible for any single farmer in Taiwan to have such a large quantity, but pooled together they could supply specific manufacturers. If the Agriculture and Food Agency wants to continue promoting coarse grain cultivation, it must take the initiative to integrate, otherwise as soybean cultivation area increases, if farmers only fight alone to sell to end consumers, sales will be under great pressure.

Chou Kuo-lung, Section Chief of Crop Research at the Kaohsiung District Agricultural Research and Extension Station, who has long promoted "edamame exports to Japan," said that according to his understanding, some farmers' associations in the Kaohsiung-Pingtung area are "unable to meet demand" because they have established brands, but some farmers still have quite difficult sales channels, so it is hard to generalize. What can be certain is that currently domestic soybeans are almost all sold in "small packages," and cases of large quantities entering tofu, bean curd skin, and dried tofu processing are rarely heard of.

Contract-grown soybeans for school lunches: Taichung City hits a wall

Last year the Taichung City Farmers' Association cooperated with the city government, planning to convert rice farmers' second rice crop into contract-grown soybeans, then supply them to the city's elementary and junior high school nutritional lunches, fulfilling demands such as local production and local sales, nutritional health, and non-genetically modified (abbreviated as non-GMO).

However, Chang Ming-cheng, director of the Farmers' Association's Extension Department, said that in the end, although 100 hectares were contract-grown and 143 farmers were linked together, because what was provided was soybeans rather than soy products, it was rejected by the schools. It is understood that more than 60 tons of soybeans could only continue piling up in the freezer.

The Taichung City Agricultural Bureau confirmed that nutritional lunch vendors hoped to directly purchase ingredients such as tofu and dried tofu, rather than additionally setting up a production line for processing, while the Farmers' Association also lacked such processing equipment and preferred to provide raw soybeans. The failure of the two sides to reach an agreement made the original good intentions of the policy fall short of expectations.