How big is agriculture? July 2011 geography notes
After coming back to Taipei, Tom and A-Pang both got sick. As everyone knows, A-Pang came down with feline lower urinary tract syndrome, and his round-the-clock caregiver, namely Tom, came down with a cold-like lethargy, to the point that he could fall asleep even while watching baseball. He spent all day half dreaming and half awake, thinking of the coast, the barren mountains, the paddy fields or the betel palms.
Just now I mustered up the energy to go to Zhuwei to buy hardware, and while walking I thought about the news of the past few days, about the chaos in the grain market and the renewed proposal of the large-farmer vision, and along the way I sorted out all the things I saw during this field survey of the Coastal Mountain Range.
Smallholder history
A letter to the editor in the paper said that the crux of Taiwan's farmer problem lies in the fragmented division of farmland, that smallholders cannot make a living, and so the government must push the policy of "small landlords, large tenant farmers."
First of all, rice farming in East Asia has always been smallholder cultivation, and in Taiwan it was large owners with small reclaiming tenants; during the historical period when agricultural production techniques and the overall industrial structure were still stagnant, the smallholder system was inevitable. The first opportunity in Taiwan's history to change the smallholder system was the modernization of the sugar industry and the monopoly of sugar capital in the early Japanese colonial period. But why did Japan not, like the Western empires in their colonies, adopt a system of large-scale farms entirely for the acquisition of raw materials, and instead, after the reorganization of large leasehold rights, retain the landlord system and small family farms?
There are two reasons. For the colonizers, abolishing the landlord system might, like Liu Mingchuan's tax policy, provoke resistance from the local gentry; in the newly annexed circumstances of Taiwan, it was better to make clever political use of this group. And exploiting farmers through tenancy brought even greater profits; Taiwanese farmers valued land, and often the whole family, old and young, had to help with farm work, so the manpower invested absolutely exceeded that of a single farm worker. In other words, through the compulsory purchase of the "raw material procurement zone system," it was actually more cost-effective than the company running its own farm with hired laborers.
Does the second reason sound familiar? Even after leaving the land, Taiwanese families have always retained this kind of diligence and hard work (another way of putting it is "self-exploitation"). In the 1960s the living room was the factory; in the 1970s and 1980s there were family helpers on construction sites; we all took part in Taiwan's economic growth from childhood. Looking at the news that the government raised the guaranteed purchase price for public grain this time to quell public resentment, we must not forget a historical perspective: the price of Taiwanese rice has long been deliberately undervalued by the rulers, which helped the government create favorable investment conditions of low wages and good prosperity for capitalists.
Whether it was the mid-colonial rice-sugar price ratio, the later rice-grain control system, or the post-war fertilizer-for-grain exchange, the rulers used various policy tools to suppress grain prices, exploiting the rural labor surplus, and thereby accumulated the capital for the great economic transformation. In other words, if these two economic transformations known as the "economic miracle" have so-called heroes, those who paid the most were the vast numbers of farmers tightening their belts.
Another historical perspective is land ownership.
Taiwan Sugar Corporation is now the largest landowner in Taiwan; its land came from the "compulsory purchase" by the colonial-era sugar manufacturing companies (in Jian Ji's words), and also from the government-owned forests and wildlands inherited after the 1895 Governor-General's Office promulgated the "Regulations on Government-Owned Forests and Wildlands and the Camphor Manufacturing Industry" (any mountain forests and wildlands without ownership deeds or other certifiable proof were deemed government-owned). The former was the encroaching appropriation of the means of production by plutocratic corporations during Taiwan's capitalization process; the latter was the swallowing and plundering of indigenous traditional territories under state violence.
Downstream in history, thoroughly returning this injustice to the land is not an appropriate approach, but I will mention at the end that in the future of national territorial reconfiguration, Taiwan Sugar Corporation must inevitably bear a certain historical responsibility.
On the other hand, Taiwan's plains smallholders, in the land reform of the 1950s, obtained ownership of farmland from landlords; as for the original landlords, the government ordered it exchanged for shares in agriculture, forestry, industry and mining, cultivating them into private civilian capital. And as mentioned earlier, even after the war, rice prices were suppressed for a long time; in the great economic transformation of the 1960s and 1970s, farmers who could no longer sustain themselves abandoned their hometown fields and settled on the urban fringe to become a cheap labor reserve army.
In the process, large amounts of smallholder land changed hands to new landlords, the future "field overseas Chinese" (tianqiaoza), while mass migration pushed up urban housing prices; whether it was this wave of housing price increases or the farmland speculation of the 1990s, farmers before and after reaped no benefit, yet might bear a lifetime of debt. Once again, it was our own bodies that bore the improper land interests and the housing price bubble; it was this enormous fictitious debt that created the stock market boom, the glossy surface of Taiwan's economy.
The large-farmer vision
According to the papers, the government this time announced a raise in the guaranteed purchase price for public grain of 3 yuan, from 23 yuan per kilogram of dry grain to 26 yuan, but the price at the farmers' production end did not rise but fell, while the price of white rice at the consumption end was relatively propped up by 4 to 5 yuan. From the farmers' production to dry grain there is still a processing stage; the subsidy premium for purchasing dry grain only fattens the middlemen who control the key to production, while the government's crude intervention in the market instead made retailers at the consumption end raise prices at the first sign of trouble.
The dark structure of the agricultural economy is also a reflection of real local politics. Between individual smallholders lacking knowledge capital and a government that takes the easy way out, who controls the farmers' association power, the rice mills, rural finance and land interests? Without understanding this link, government subsidies will only flow into the pockets of rural exploiters, or even make the government an accomplice; and behind every tour-bus sightseeing group or all kinds of rural construction, smallholders continue to easily hand power to local heads.
The thinking behind subsidies is to treat agriculture as disadvantaged (frankly, for the sake of elections), but in fact agriculture is no longer so. As with the duck-rice in Yuanli, or the "Applause" grain in Taitung, we can see that when knowledge capital is invested, traditional rice farming also has great economic value; and if the government intervenes excessively, or even populistically imposes grain prices by force, then agribusinesses like Chung Hsing, which created high added value through innovative rice-milling technology, would find it impossible.
In other words, it is precisely the bloody post-WTO and post-ECFA situation in which Taiwanese rice farming achieved unprecedented results in the free market. Looking back, the earliest suppressed cheap rice, the recently subsidized disadvantaged agriculture, or the high-yield premium rice farming -- which is the large farming we want?
What the government should do well is provide opportunities for young people to return to their hometowns, re-examine the local black gold produced in the democratization process, re-accumulate the rural knowledge capital lost in the urbanization process, and let the farmers on the land once again grasp the power of local politics, rather than being usurped by construction companies, gravel operators, rice mills, farmers' association officers or old-guard legislators, which obscures the true democratic voice. The government should not only refrain from serving capital and forcibly expropriating farmland to become industrial zones, but should also keep a close watch on farmland being used for farming, and not let farmland continue to be speculated on and turned into luxury homes.
↑Community workshop. When the countryside accumulates knowledge capital.
The absurd governance of misallocated resources
Compared with the construction companies that also took to Ketagalan Boulevard shouting for the loosening of farmland restrictions, there is another extreme view: to defend traditional farming across the board, treating every paddy field as a matter of national food security and not allowing it to lie fallow. Or perhaps we have all been dazzled by the ever-rising global food crisis and forgotten that what we should pursue is flexible food autonomy, not food self-sufficiency in the manner of a scramble for grain (and even more to be feared, that kind of beggar-thy-neighbor export control).
Taiwan's agricultural production uses too much pesticide and chemical fertilizer, and has already become "intensive-care-unit-style agriculture"; it must be adjusted, and the most urgent crisis facing current agriculture is the low willingness to farm, and under the impact of the declining birthrate, Taiwan's various land and housing markets will face severe turbulence and price readjustment in the future. How can we keep the people and agriculture from again bearing the harm of a bubble?
Let us also bring the mountain areas into our thinking. Taiwan's agricultural landscape is usually like this:
The Forestry Bureau allocates public land or leases slope land to farmers; farmers plant shallow-rooted high-value crops; the local government repairs access roads in election years; and the cement works cut the slopes even more harmfully than betel palms. Upstream, the units responsible for soil and water conservation build check dams level by level to protect the production bases and settlements on the alluvial plains, but the quickly silted-up dam bodies accumulate the next wave of even greater crisis, and this gravel cannot be dredged because of high transport costs; by contrast, downstream, gravel operators dredge gravel by legal dredging contracts every flood season, but the enormous profits always drive them to over-mine and steal-mine, altering hydrology by manpower on unsupervised riverbeds and endangering bridge safety; our national planning budget encourages afforestation, but the Taiwan Sugar Corporation takes away more than half of it, and mostly on flatland. What I want to emphasize is that this is a kind of misallocation of resources: the resources we invest in governance are the disasters we spent money to create.
↑Potential stream. The silted-up check dam, a hidden crisis.
Just like industrial zone planning, the government unjustly expropriated land to build the fourth phase of the Central Taiwan Science Park, but if we shift our gaze just a little, fifteen years later the Changhua Coastal Industrial Park has become a "mosquito zone." These misallocations of resources are also political problems at the same time: the former highlights vote-driven thinking, engineering interests, and how enterprises siphon money from the national governance budget; the latter is in fact not any kind of technological vision, it is real estate speculation, and those driven out can never buy back the past from the capitalists.
A historical opportunity for national territorial reconfiguration
The declining birthrate will inevitably impact Taiwan's overall land use, but this also provides us with a new opportunity for comprehensive governance of Taiwan's agricultural landscape:
First, the low willingness to farm is an inevitability of the current industrial structure; although we mentioned the large-farmer vision earlier, before it is realized, what will inevitably be experienced is the aging of the agricultural generation and large-scale abandonment of cultivation. Relying only on new farmers buying land is not enough. The government must not only carry out the aforementioned farmland-for-farming use, so that construction companies do not plunder the land of old farmers, but more importantly, it should use land policy to guarantee the lives of old farmers, and this absolutely cannot be achieved by buy-off-style allowances.
Imagine reversing the aforementioned misallocation of resources, and taking the budget for building and maintaining roads and cement works in the high mountains to buy land.
The government should treat farmers as national laborers who maintain the land. When they no longer farm and vacate large amounts of farmland, it must prevent their land from collapsing in the market. The best method is high-price acquisition by the public sector, guaranteeing the retirement lives of old farmers, and in some agricultural regions reproducing concentrated state ownership of land. At this time the price of land will depend on its real condition. Those landlords or owners of fake luxury homes who develop farmland into gravel pits, or refill farmland with waste, will not benefit from the new policy.
What should be done with this newly repurchased state-owned land? One, lie fallow to restore soil fertility; two, lease at fair prices for friendly farming; three, plan it as ecological reserve land; better still, make it into ponds to solve water resource problems; and most importantly, use high-quality flatland state-owned land as a policy tool for ecological governance of Taiwan's mountain areas.
Let us look back at the land users in Taiwan's mountain areas. Those who struggle to make a living in these marginal zones are mostly disadvantaged groups in society. (All right, the hot spring operators who occupy the floodway to build hotels are the exception.) And returning to the history of ethnic migration, unless forced, no tribe would choose to live on a dangerous river valley alluvial fan.
But in contemporary politics, we cannot simply force these farmers, who have already settled for several generations, to migrate for purely ecological reasons, and to give up their traditional territories and settlement culture; frankly, that would be no more just than the previous colonizers' group relocation in the mountain areas carried out under defense considerations.
However, the government also cannot wait until a disaster happens to force village relocation. Reflecting on past history, we can understand that the current traditional territories are in fact social facts established only after several generations of production, and the so-called traditional culture is in fact a lost friendly mode of production; therefore, we can call this project ecological migration, and the key lies in whether farmers can obtain remuneration from future labor to maintain reasonable living conditions, and whether indigenous tradition can be incorporated into new forms of social production, rather than being reduced to urban seasonal workers or the other of the homeland watched over by complicated modern regulations.
↑Betel palm plantation. The culprit of mudslides is not a certain crop or the farmers struggling on the land, but the overall land use and mode of production.
As for relocation, if the government could use farmland in the plains as an exchange for over-limit farmland in the mountains, and plan new settlements taking into account interpersonal networks and historical memory, then the Taivoan people would not necessarily have to fight for on-site reconstruction of Xiaolin Village; why could they not return to the plains and rebuild the even more ancient "Tayovan" in Taiwan's history?
And there is also returning to the hometown. If the new mountain governance framework reorganizes and regathers, abandoning the economic development thinking that belongs to the counties, cities and five special municipalities, then we can recover the truest traditions of the original homeland, hunt the flying squirrels that should be hunted and eat the wild boars that should be eaten, because they are naturally the guardians of these mountains and forests and a part of the ecosystem; the conservation work that modern administrative organizations spend resources on in forests and watersheds is in fact precisely the function that indigenous communities have always performed in tradition.
State function: equalization of land rights and landscape restoration
When the aforementioned misallocation of resources is reversed, under the historical opportunity of the declining birthrate, closing off and conserving Taiwan's fragile over-utilized mountain areas, adjusting agricultural production in the plains, rebuilding ponds and wetlands to replace reservoir projects, planning reserves where indigenous peoples can produce and use according to their traditions, cultivating large farmers with market competitiveness and knowledge capital, and establishing new local politics and community oversight systems, only then does a comprehensive practice of all these visions become possible.
As a supplementary note, the speed at which the government buys back farmland may not catch up with the strikes of natural disasters and the need for reconfiguration. Before that, it is time for Taiwan Sugar Corporation to bear its historical responsibility and give back to society.
This is not difficult; in the end it is still a matter of resource reorganization. Taiwan Sugar Corporation has always cooperated with the government in releasing its idle land for conversion to industrial zones, science parks, new towns and other uses. Thinking about Taiwan's future overall land use, all the above policies should change course. As for the national budget subsidizing Taiwan Sugar Corporation's flatland landscape afforestation, this absurd governance logic and funneling of benefits should never have happened at all.
In the new era we must face all kinds of major crises. We will extravagantly hope that agribusinesses will have a fit of conscience and defend Taiwan's food autonomy; we will expect environmental trust funds to snatch precious ecology back from the mouths of capital; or when natural disasters strike we hope for the support of residential insurance companies to get through it all. But why take the long way around? Do not forget, we are all taxpaying investors, we are all shareholders exercising rights by stamping the ballot, so let the state, this aggregation of us the public, play its new role.
The greatest difficulty standing in the way of our imagination is that, judging from its composition and its performance over the past nearly twenty years, Taiwan's two major parties are both capitalist parties; they speak for construction companies and fob farmers off with subsidies or allowances, while to the common people they feed the grand-lottery opium of rising housing prices and a ten-thousand-point stock market benefiting everyone, and we who are addicted to it have in fact never been able to afford it.
So, what matters is to overthrow them, or force them to change.
Thinking keeps you healthy and strong. Having finished his homework, Tom is going to feed A-Pang his medicine.
Sunday interview / Chen Chi-chung, Distinguished Professor of the Department of Applied Economics at National Chung Hsing University: Correct the erroneous agricultural subsidy policy
Smallholders become large farmers, making a living is no longer a dream
Keywords: smallholder history. Large-farmer vision. Misallocation of resources. National territorial reconfiguration. Equalization of land rights. Landscape restoration.