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Agriculture needs
food sovereignty to survive
By Chen Ping-hsuan 陳平軒
Speaking in reference to the 830 Chinese agricultural products currently banned
from being imported into Taiwan, Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Bao-ji
(陳保基) was reported as saying at a press conference on Jan. 29 that it was at the
moment impossible to state categorically either that imports of these products
would, or would not, be allowed to be imported in the future.
For Chen to be so ambiguous about a policy that would have a huge impact on
Taiwan’s quality of life, industry and food sovereignty is truly shocking.
A look at 2011 alone shows that Taiwan’s trade deficit for agricultural products
reached US$10.17 billion, which is approximately equivalent to the combined
income of Taiwan’s 315,959 farmers.
Heavy dumping of foreign agricultural products has also caused real prices of
Taiwan’s agricultural products to drop and this has directly affected farmers,
whose real income per capita dropped from NT$270,000 in 2000 to NT$220,000 in
2011, which is only 70 percent of the levels enjoyed by non-farmers.
The government has implemented agricultural policies to force farmers into
leaving their farmland fallow and amended laws to deregulate the trading of
agricultural land, with the result that farmland is being used for industrial
and urban development.
Taiwan has consequently lost 4,000 hectares of farmland per year over the past
decade.
Taiwan’s current food self-sufficiency ratio is a mere 33.49 percent and last
year’s consumer price index food products saw the largest increase of all
products, moving up by 4.16 percent. This reveals the severe fluctuations in
prices of consumer goods, which affect consumers and farmers most significantly.
It is already too late to combat the dumping of agricultural products from the
US and other countries, but Chen could not give a straight answer on whether
imports of the banned Chinese agricultural products would be allowed in future,
or propose a policy to deal with the situation.
There is no doubt that the dumping of agricultural products will make lives
harder for all Taiwanese, and it also worsens Taiwan’s already critical food
safety issues.
Today’s free trade and neoliberalism has created a situation in which large
multinational companies do everything they can to grab production resources
around the world and monopolize distribution channels, then use political, legal
and financial means to chisel off the surplus that should be enjoyed by the
original producers.
In this process, consumers are stripped of their rights. They can no longer
freely choose healthy and well-priced foods in reasonable amounts. Instead,
consumers are struggling to maintain a semblance of consumer freedom as large
transnational capitalists manipulate markets.
According to the Nyeleni Declaration issued at the Forum for Food Sovereignty in
Africa in 2007, food sovereignty is “the right of peoples to healthy and
culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable
methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”
Food sovereignty, therefore, is about producers and consumers being in charge of
their own affairs.
What Taiwan needs now is not unfair trade based on exploitation, but a set of
policies based on the smaller agricultural systems that we already have in
place. These policies should allow Taiwanese farmers and consumers to decide
what they want to plant, how they want to plant crops and what they want to eat.
Chen Ping-hsuan is a research fellow at Taiwan Rural Front.
Translated by Drew Cameron
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