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The many benefits of
paddy fields
By Chan Shun-kuei 詹順貴
Spring rains having arrived later than usual, Taiwan faces its gravest water
shortage in seven years. Meanwhile, poor harvests around the world have caused
food prices to soar. As if the 2008 global financial crisis was not bad enough,
a food crisis is creeping up on us.
Vice Premier Sean Chen (陳沖) has called it a “quiet tsunami,” because of its role
as a catalyst for the “jasmine revolutions” in the Middle East and North Africa.
This is the first time Taiwan has been confronted by these two kinds of crisis
at the same time. What is absurd is that, with a food crisis looming, the
Environmental Protection Administration says it plans to relax restrictions on
some forms of cultivation in weir catchment areas, allowing it to go ahead
without any environmental impact assessment.
At a national conference on food security on May 10 to May 12, the Council of
Agriculture announced that it would promote local production for local
consumption, with the aim of raising national food self-sufficiency to 40
percent by 2020. Taiwan has relatively poor water resources, and is right now
taking measures to deal with the threat of drought. In such a situation, the
government’s food self-sufficiency target may seem unrealistic, but is in fact
not so far-fetched.
Taiwan’s self-sufficiency in soybeans, wheat and maize is almost nil. On the
surface, the nation appears to be 90 percent self-sufficient in rice, but that
is largely because dietary habits are becoming Westernized. According to Lin
Kuo-ching (林國慶), a professor of agricultural economics at National Taiwan
University, consumption of rice per person in Taiwan is the lowest among all
countries where rice is the main staple food. Earlier this year, the council
called on Taiwanese to help farmers get their paddy fields back into production
by eating a bit more rice each day. This should help promote national food
self-sufficiency.
Most think that growing rice in paddy fields uses up a lot of water and is of
little economic benefit, and that devoting more land to rice would put Taiwan’s
water supply under greater strain. That may be true under the current short-term
conditions, but in the long term, paddy fields actually do not use a lot of
water. On the contrary, they are an efficient way of circulating water.
Apart from the private benefit gained by farmers harvesting rice, paddy fields
are beneficial for the whole nation. Research conducted in Taiwan and abroad
confirms that paddy fields help regulate floodwater and replenish groundwater.
The reservoir ponds that dot Taiwan’s countryside contribute to this effect.
Other benefits of paddy fields include beautifying the environment, purifying
water, regulating the temperature and generating oxygen.
In Japan, water resources expert Minoru Nakagawa has done research on water
infiltration into the soil from paddy field irrigation. He estimates paddy field
irrigation throughout Japan conserves about 3.93 billion cubic meters of
underground water a year, and that 9.8 billion cubic meters permeate deep
underground. At the time this research was done, that was roughly equal to the
amount of groundwater drawn in Japan each year.
Research commissioned by the council in 2002 into paddy field cultivation in
Taiwan found that about 60 percent of the water used for paddy field irrigation
infiltrates back into the ground, while most of the remaining 40 percent
evaporates into the atmosphere. This water vapor helps regulate the temperature
and can return to the earth’s surface in the form of rain. Only a very small
amount of water is absorbed by rice plants.
In 1993, Tsai Ming-hua (蔡明華), now director of the council’s Department of
Irrigation and Engineering, carried out research into the beneficial effects of
paddy field irrigation. He found that, between 1982 and 1992, the reduction of
land devoted to paddy fields caused Taiwan to lose 13.473 billion tonnes of
groundwater that would otherwise have been replenished through paddy field
irrigation — roughly 23 times the storage capacity of the Zengwen Reservoir
(曾文水庫).
Fighting drought in the short term may require extraordinary means, but water
resources also need to be planned over the long term. Consumption can be reduced
through pricing, by charging higher, differential and progressive rates for
water use. Replacing old pipes would reduce leakage. Domestic and industrial
wastewater can be recycled and reused. Existing reservoirs should be preserved
wherever possible. Soil and water in reservoir catchment areas could be
conserved by preventing unauthorized farming and construction.
Proper care should be taken of farmers and the land. Putting fallow fields back
into production would make Taiwan more self-sufficient in food, and it would
also replenish groundwater, forming a natural reservoir. As well as regulating
the water supply, this would reduce the problem of land subsidence. To do so
would have many advantages, since it would cost less and have a smaller
environmental impact than building more reservoirs, artificial lakes or
desalination plants.
Food and water are precious in terms of value rather than price. Governments
cannot allow food prices to go through the roof, because if food becomes
unaffordable, the government runs the risk of being overthrown or voted out of
power. In the past, economists who followed the capitalist tradition repeated a
false idea so many times that it came to be accepted as truth.
Based on food prices, which are held down, they concluded that the output value
of agriculture is too low, and called on governments to reclassify farmland so
that it can be used for other purposes and to divert water from farming to other
uses. In their view, free trade allows us to buy as much cheap food and water as
we need at any time. However, as the price of oil keeps climbing and in the wake
of poor harvests, the idea that free trade is all--powerful has been exposed as
false. The EU and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization are doing their
best to conserve farmland and ensure food security. Agriculture is once more
being given the recognition it deserves.
It is even more important for Taiwan, which is far from self-sufficient in food
and has meager water resources, to discard such old mistaken ideas and to
formulate new food and water resources policies based on the recognition that we
are going to have to fight to survive.
Chan Shun-kuei is chairman of the Taiwan Bar Association’s environmental law
committee.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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