Technological Momentum and The Hegemony of The Green Revolution: A Case Study of An Organic Rice Cooperative in Taiwan

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (2011) 5:139 DOI 10.1215/18752160-1276808 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 K.-M.
Lo (*) Graduate Institution for Social Transformation Studies, Shih-Hsin University, 111 Muzha Rd. Sec. 1, Wenshan Dist., Taipei City, 116, Taiwan e-mail: kimeileft@hotmail.com H.-H. Chen (*) Graduate Institution for Social Transformation Studies, Shih-Hsin University, 111 Muzha Rd. Sec. 1, Wenshan Dist., Taipei City, 116, Taiwan e-mail: dkchen10@gmail.com Received: 13 July 2010 / Accepted: 8 February 2011 q National Science Council, Taiwan 2011
Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution: A Case Study of an Organic Rice Cooperative in Taiwan
Kuei-Mei Lo and Hsin-Hsing Chen
Abstract Increasing productivity through high-yield, high-response, chemicaldependent food crop cultivars to stabilize rural societythat was the Cold War era social-technical strategy commonly known as the Green Revolution. A similar strategy was implemented in Taiwan in the 1950s as part of a rural reconstruction program sponsored by the United States. Aside from establishing a comprehensive web of social-technical institutions associated with modern agriculture, with the focus on the highly regulated rice sector, the program left a profound and multifaceted legacy in rural Taiwan, affecting social norms no less than it did the landscape. The authors of this article look at how the Green Revolution legacy affected an organic rice cooperative in Meinung, Taiwan. Decades of rural-urban migration have made agricultural machinery a necessity for most farmers. A tight relationship between machine service providers and the seedling production system connes farmers choices of cultivars to those that are designed for modern cultivation, and these are not often well suited to organic methods. In addition, the comprehensive public technical-social support system that fostered the Green Revolution-style agriculture hardly exists for organic farmers in todays ethos of privatization. Those interwoven factors seriously hinder attempts to deviate from the modern agricultures chemical-dependent path of agriculture. Keywords organic agriculturerice cultivarfarmers cooperativeagrobureaucracy
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K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen
1 Introduction Rice is at the center of a worldwide controversy. When the World Trade Organization met in Hong Kong in December 2005, the avenues outside the meeting place were lled with protesters, including environmental activists from rural Taiwan, peasant activists from Brazil, and a Bangladeshi womens group that performed street theater presenting rice as the soul of life. Later these groups all watched in awe as Korean farmers distressed by plans to relax restrictions on rice imports charged the police phalanx. Since the late 1990s, such events have become integral parts of the antiglobalization movement and have attested to the increasing anxieties of people about todays agriculture. Farming as a means to sustainable livelihood is under threat, many believe, and the threats are structural and intertwined: forced changes to national agricultural policies, social and environmental degradation, increasing global monopoly on farm inputs and outputs, the hazards presented by chemical-dependent agriculture, and so on. Biotechnology, the proposed panacea for agricultural problems, is often viewed with suspicion, as major players in this eld are the same corporations who have long been regarded as responsible for our current crisis. By contrast, organic farms, particularly small family farms, are regarded by most groups as part of the solution (see, e.g., Tilman 1998). Many groups view biotechnology with suspicionnot only activists, farmers, and scholars, but also the generally apolitical public. In Taiwan, for instance, organic produce shops and shelves of organic produce in the supermarket are now commonplace from big cities to small towns, although many wonder exactly what the word organic means and whether it has been honestly applied. Campaigning politicians routinely present visions of a green and organic future for the city, the county, or the nation. The public has embraced organic farming as it has other social-technical reforms. However, a welcoming attitude does not guarantee genuine changes in agricultural practice. As in many other countries, organic farmers in Taiwan have experimented with a wide variety of crops, practices, and organizational forms since the 1990s. The case examined in this articlethe founding of an organic rice cooperativeis part of this wider movement. The site of our study is Meinung township, Kaohsiung County, in southern Taiwan, a traditional rice-growing area. The expressed goal of the cooperative at its inception in 2005 was to make organic rice production economically feasible. A series of setbacks led to its demise in 2009. The unexpectedly strong obstacles encountered by the cooperative vividly demonstrate the intricately interconnected social-technical components of the Green Revolution system and the hegemonic power such a system possesses. Taiwans emerging STS community has produced few studies of agriculture and rural society. The principal Chinese-language STS journal, Keji, yiliao yu shehui ( Science, technology, medicine, and society), has published only two articles on agriculture, and they present contrasting views of contemporary rural Taiwan. Like Jack Ralph Kloppenburg (2004), the inuential rural sociologist and critic of agricultural biotechnology, Wang (2007) critically examined the global monopoly on biotechnology held by a few transnational corporations and warned of the threat this presented to farmers. Yang (2001) endowed farmers with much more agency and innovative capacity embedded in local community, while acknowl-
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edging that the market could indeed be hostile. They work from different angles, but their perspectives are not necessarily contradictory. While Wang focused on globally traded bulk foodstuffs such as maize and soybean and Yang on local specialty fruit, a study of rice in Taiwan tends to evoke very different questions and has the potential to be more complex. Some rice farmers can, in keeping with the so-called delicate agriculture promoted by the government since the 1980s, cultivate distinctive local specialties, but most are never far from the looming threat of transnational agribusiness. This is especially true because of the commitment to liberalization that Taiwan made in order to enter the World Trade Organization. However, as in South Korea and Japan, changes in the rice sector occur slower than in other farm sectors, and the vast majority of rice farmers still belong to what Larry Burmeister (2000) calls the state-rice complex. In this system, private breed patents are rare, and the public sector plays a big part in rice research, production, and distribution. The hegemonic social-technical order reproduced by agrobureaucratic institutions, what we think of as their technological momentum, remains formidable. Central to that momentum is materiality, specically the material characteristics of the rice plant and its material requirements.
2 The Green Revolution System The term Green Revolution is often used to refer to the changes that produced the modern global paradigm for food production. Central to this paradigm is the largescale monoculture of laboratory-bred high-yield, high-response food crops. Accompanying the planting of such varieties, a comprehensive technological system delivers synthetic fertilizers, agrochemicals, irrigation, machinery, and other inputs to the eld; otherwise the plants will not grow as expected. Such requirements are built in. They enter the system at the rst stage of agricultural technologybreeding. Thus, once she or he has chosen a cultivated variety, the farmer has little leeway in making subsequent economic and technical decisions. Although the term Green Revolution was not coined until 1968, when the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines introduced IR8, using high-yield food crop cultivars and increased agricultural productivity to stabilize rural society began earlier. In Taiwan, this has been an explicit goal of the US-China Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR, Zhongguo noncun fuxing lianhe weiyuan hui ) since its founding in 1948. The case is unique in several regards, but we believe its basic characteristics are identical to those of other modern rural development programs, such as those carried out in South Korea and Japan (Burmeister 2000). The Green Revolution went from a technological development to a robust socialcultural institution. According to the famous speech given by William Gaud, the director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in 1968, new high-yield cultivars had been developed as part of a political plan.1 The
Commenting on the record high food harvest in Pakistan, India, Turkey, and the Philippines, Gaud (1968) said: These and other developments in the eld of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution.
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Rockefeller Foundation, USAID, and other promoters of these cultivars envisioned them as a technological x for the Communist Problem in the rural Third World, the answer to the Red agrarian revolution. Political outcomes of the Green Revolution strategy varied from place to place: utter failure in wartime South Vietnam, but success in countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. So successful has the Green Revolution been in Taiwan that any deviation, such as organic farming, faces great challenges. In spite of its substantial success in increasing food production in many countries, the Green Revolution paradigm is by no means unquestioned. Concerns with adverse social and environmental effects have spread wide and deep around the world. Many activists, including environmentalists, supporters of farmers rights, and those concerned about food security, have raised alarms. The privatization of plant breeding analyzed and criticized by Kloppenburg in his 1988 book, First the Seed, has been rendered even more disturbing in recent decades with the advent of genetically modied organisms (GMO) and the patenting of seeds, subjects Kloppenburg addresses in a rich chapter added to the books second edition in 2004. The diverse movements and advocacy groups opposing this trend have organized into an integral part of the worldwide antiglobalization movement since the 1990s. They often argue that the high capital investments that the Green Revolution style agriculture requires favor rich farmers and agribusiness, which will lead to an increasing concentration of farmland ownership and the impoverishment of landless peasants. This, however, has not happened in Taiwan. Taiwan was singled out by Frances Moore Lapp and Joseph Collins (1977) in their early polemic against the Green Revolution. It showed, they said, that the same techniques they associated with immiseration could produce more desirable social outcomes when applied in conjunction with proper social-economic arrangements. During the rapid growth of the 1970s and early 1980s, Taiwan was praised by many development economists as an example of growth with equality (e.g., Fei et al. 1979). Strict land reform laws prevented concentration of farmland ownership, and a relatively well-established public technical and nancial support network managed to provide access to improved technology for most small farmers for decades. As a result, acceptance of the Green Revolution technologies in rural Taiwan is wide and deep among the generation of farmers who have personally experienced the productivity gains. Productivity increase, however, did not prevent rural Taiwan, particularly the rice-growing areas, from becoming economically stagnant in the 1970s. Chronic social-economic crisis persists in rural Taiwan since then. The recent turn toward organic farming is considered one possibility for overcoming such stagnation. Advocates of organic agriculture in contemporary Taiwan frequently identify the hindrances to organic farming as ideological or political: they believe that they can be overcome by rigorous discursive practices and adequate policy reforms.2 We would like to argue, however, that there are material causes that are critical and should not be
It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution. 2 A prominent participant in this discourse is the magazine Qing Ya-er (The Sprout), which has been published bimonthly since 2003. Its contributors and subscribers include both organic farmers and consumers.
overlooked. An established technological system, such as Green Revolution style rice farming, is more than patterns of human behavior and sets of ideas. Like the seventeenth-century French state formation analyzed by Chandra Mukerji (1994), the modern East Asian state-rice complex is embodied in a material formin this case, seeds, machines, and cultivated landscapes. Around these material phenomena, people construct and reproduce modern Taiwanese rural culture and society. Therefore, growing rice organically involves decoupling from the system, not only changing technological practices but also confronting a series of complex power relations. If organic farming is to win a signicant place in Taiwanese farming, it is not enough to address discourse and state policy.
3 Research Methods Following the liberation pedagogy of Paulo Freire (2006), participatory research seeks to capture reality by participating in the collective effort of the masses to change their reality. As change happens, previously hidden facets of a complex reality become visible, often in the form of unforeseen obstacles to collective action. This article is largely based on such an approach. We take the obstacles we encounter not merely as problems to be solved but also as heuristic moments to be captured, analyzed, and used to understand a larger structure. We also make a special effort to enroll our research subjects as fellow inquirers as much as possible, in the hope that our ndings can help in the formation of what Freire called a shared knowledge of the causes of reality (134). From 2005 to 2008, one of the authors (Kuei-Mei Lo) participated in organizing Meinungs Organic Rice Production and Marketing Cooperative Units (PMCU).3 Throughout, Lo engaged in discussions with Hsin-Hsing Chen, who had participated in the farmers right movement during the 1980s. Intensive interviews were conducted with fty-ve rice farmers and persons in related industries and institutions from April to December 2005. (See appendix 2 for the list of interviewees.) Preliminary ndings of a comparison between the interviews and archival data were presented for discussion and revision in a series of meetings with fteen to twenty farmers and other community members in Meinung. The drafts of subsequent papers on the topic were also reviewed by community members. Meanwhile, Lo worked as a staff member of the Meinung Peoples Association from April to November 2005 and thereafter helped out in the founding of the organic rice cooperative. Beginning in May 2006, Lo worked as a legislative assistant in the Legislative Yuan (Taiwans parliament) and met every other week with fellow cooperative members in an attempt to introduce government budget measures that favored organic farmers. Although no substantial policy gains were made in that period, the collective effort did reveal the intricate character of agricultural policy in Taiwan.
3 An Agricultural Production and Marketing Cooperative Unit (, PMCU) is an autonomous section of a local Farmers Association (). Members of a PMCU are entitled to government subsidies on collectively owned farm implements and installations. The degree of collectivization found in PMCUs varies greatly. Although administratively subordinate to the Farmers Association, a PMCU is an independent economic unit with its own elected ofcials and is legally responsible for its own operation.
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During this period of participatory research, most data were recorded as eld notes. In-depth interviews were recorded and transcribed, but frequent and continuous discussions with various research subject/participants were the most important means of verifying data for this article.4 Members of the cooperative were surprised by how difcult it was to get the project going. Challenges ranged from seed characteristics, machine specications, neighborhood hostilities to political pressure, and economic stress; all were related to Green Revolution agriculture system that has become an establishment since the 1950s. This case, therefore, provides a good vantage point from which to examine what Burmeister (2000) calls the state-rice complex in East Asia.
4 Technological Momentum and Hegemony The technological system of Green Revolution style rice production is central to ricebased communities like Meinung. Introducing organic methods posed, in hindsight, a challenge to a well-established network of social-technical power. The network had long been taken for granted. It extends far beyond the realm of the technical, into a myriad of social and cultural realms, and its authority is reproduced not by coercive means, but with the active consent of many community members. We shall use two concepts as the bases of our analysishegemony, a concept familiar to all, and technological momentum, which we take from the history of technology. The historian Thomas P. Hughes (1969) proposed the concept of technological momentum to analyze the formation of complex systems through time. He used it to great effect in his work on the history of the German chemical cartel IG Farben, which went from being a fertilizer company with a novel hydrogenation technology to an ardent nancier of the Nazi Party in its path to power. Throughout this process, decision makers in the cartel saw their endeavor mainly in technological terms. IG Farben, according to Hughess account, began as a quite apolitical corporate entity. However, as more and more resources were committed to the technology and the new businesses derived from the hydrogenation technique, certain vested interests, organizational norms, and political considerations arose, soon exceeding the control of any individual. Hughes dened a technological system as including both physical hardware and softwarethe technical componentsand the associated social components; combined, they form a world that is made up of institutions, values, interest groups, social classes, and political and economic forces (Hughes 1994: 102). A typical technological system, according to him, goes through four phases from its inception to maturity. In the rst phase, the invention and development of a specic system are considered amongst an array of possibilities. In the second phase, technology is transferred from one region and society to another. The third phase is characterized by system growth, especially growth through overcoming critical problems or elements of the technology that have regressed as part of a general pattern of uneven advance-
Direct quotations from our eld notes and recorded interviews are indicated with our original lettered coding such as Interviewee B, rVacca or Lao Xie eld-Saicb.
ment. After such reverse salients have been dened and eliminated, a system enters the fourth phase characterized by technological momentum: A system with substantial momentum has mass, velocity, and direction (Hughes 1983: 14) After the system matures and gains momentum, change of direction is unlikely without a signicant historical event, as the momentum provides an inertia of directed motion (15). Among the factors contributing to such inertia are acquired skill and knowledge, special-purpose machines and processes, enormous physical structures, and organizational bureaucracy (Hughes 1994: 108). The metaphor of momentum accounted for the time-dependent development of a system, bridging the gap between the two major approaches in technology studies. He maintained: A technological system can be both a cause and an effect; it can shape or be shaped by society. As they grow larger and more complex, systems tend to be more shaping of society and less shaped by it. Therefore, the momentum of technical systems is a concept that can be located somewhere between the poles of technical determinism and social constructivism. The social constructivists have a key to understanding the behavior of young systems; technical determinists come into their own with the mature ones (Hughes 1994: 112). As we shall show in what follows, Green Revolution style rice production in Taiwan has reached Hughess fourth phase, and a substantial momentum is easily discernable. Organic farming, by comparison, comes as an innovation, and shows exhibits diversity, vulnerability, versatility, and many other characteristics typical of the rst phase. Hughess model depends on the analytical separation of the technological system from its social, political, and cultural environment, which he means elements that are not under the control of the system. But for us the environmental factors need to be seen as something more than the backdrops to the main event. From the 1950s, the Green Revolution approach has been part of a larger project of capitalist rural socialcultural transformation, not simply a technological endeavor. Correspondingly, analysis of its legacy needs to account for that whole project. We hope to highlight the hegemonic character of the Green Revolution and the social relations it engendered. The modern concept of hegemony was rst fully developed in the Marxist tradition by Antonio Gramsci (1971) to describe the bourgeois leadership of democratic revolutions. Subsequent social theorists have found hegemony an especially useful idea for analyzing diverse and relatively stable class societies such as Western liberal democracy (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Bocock 1986). Anthropologists of Chinese culture often use the concept of hegemony to analyze the complex and contradictory characteristics of folk ritual system. (e.g., Sangren 1987). Since Michael Burawoys inuential ethnography of machine-shop workers (1979), the concept of hegemony has often been used among theorists of labor process to denote a form of politics in which the dominated groups actively engage in practices that often implicitly reinforce the position of the dominating group(s), and hence consent to the dominant values. The antithesis of hegemony is despotism, in which unilateral exercise of (raw or ideological) coercive power is directly present in full view, and. Despots look for compliance rather than consent. A stable hegemonic order cannot exist without activethough ultimately ineffectiveresistance. Following Burawoy, later researchers often differentiate hegemony from ideological dominance: the former is subtle, dissolved, and often self-contradictory, while the latter is well articulated (e.g., Sturdy et al. 1992).
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In todays Taiwan, norms, values and practices associated with Green Revolution style agriculture are not overtly enforced by political, administrative, or intellectual authorities. On the contrary, organic farming is very much in fashion in both elite and public discourse. The dominance of the chemical-dependent conventional agriculture is now mainly reinforced by common farmers. And their reasons for doing this have hardly ever been expressed in the form of articulated arguments. Instead, those attitudes remain subtle, piecemeal, and taken for granted. In other words, this is a hegemonic rather than a despotic regime. We believe that this is a result of the particular history of Taiwans rural development since the 1950s.
5 Background: Green Revolution Agriculture in Meinung Meinung township lends itself well to eld research on the state-rice complex. Although it was under threat for decades, rice cultivation is still at the heart of this community. The majority of Meinungs 43,000 residents are descendants of Hakka pioneers who settled the valley and ood plains at the convergence of two rivers in 1736. According to ofcial statistics from 2004, more than one-third of the townships total area of 7,573 hectares is still registered as farmland, and over 40 percent of the total population is listed as in farming households.5 The vast majority of the farmers are small landholders, although 87 percent of the farm households own less than one hectare of land, and 60 percent of the farmers lease land in order to put together enough acreage to get by. Low agricultural revenue is a persistent problem. Only roughly 30 percent of the farming households are categorized as full-time farmers, and the majority rely on off-farm sources to provide more than half of household income (Gaoxiong xian zhengfu 2004). These features are typical of contemporary rural Taiwan. Meinung has been investigated in several intensive ethnographic studies over recent decades. The American anthropologist Myron L. Cohen (1976) did his eldwork here in the mid-1960s and wrote an ethnography centering on the kinship system of Hakka Chinese. In the mid 1980s, the Australian geographer Irene Bain (1993) used eldwork in Meinung to discuss transformation of agricultural policies and local responses to them. Many Taiwanese scholars and writers have also written about Meinung. With a relatively steady agricultural economy, Meinung is among the last rural townships to be de-populated by rural-urban migration, and hence a source of pastoral inspiration for the Nativist vernacular literature since the 1970s.6 Still, Bain (1993) remains the only systematic social study of agriculture in Meinung to date.
5 Although all ofcial records and statistics rely on the metric system, the customary unit of farmland area used in Taiwan is always jia , or morgen, a legacy of Dutch colonialism. One jia equals 0.9699 hectares, and it is divided into ten fen . We use both metric units and customary units in this article, opting for what the context demands. The persistence of jia and fen may be connected to the tremendous technological momentum rice cultivation possesses in Taiwan. Registration of farmland ownership started in the Dutch era from 1624 to 1662. So central to local society did the system imposed by Dutch imperialists in the seventeenth century become, that it lingered through four subsequent governments. 6 Nativist Literature () or Literature of Home Villages is a cultural movement starting in the 1970s. Nativist works were often critical to the burgeoning industrialization and the increasing social
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5.1 Rice and the Landscape Rice is still the dominant crop in Meinung. In the rst planting season of 2005, for instance, 2,609 out of the towns 5,222 farming households planted rice, accounting for approximately 40 percent of the 2,833 hectares of farmland cultivated in that period. Other important crops include tobacco, bananas, and papayas (Gaoxiong xian zhengfu 2004). The main varieties of rice cultivated in Meinung are japonicas (), a legacy of Japanese colonial rule. Before that half-century, Taiwan had been shipping rice to Mainland China for two centuries. The main varieties grown in that period were longgrained indicas. Indicas are common in tropical and subtropical Asia, but their taste, aroma, and texture differ from the rice found on Japanese tables, so the colonial power brought in its preferred strains. In order to transform Taiwan into the granary for the empire, the Japanese colonial government commissioned breeding programs in the early twentieth century to adapt japonica varieties to the local environment. The rst successfully localized japonica cultivar was Ponlai rice (), developed by the Japanese agronomist Iso Eikichi () in 1921. Japonicas gradually replaced the original indicas. They required more synthetic nutrients, especially nitrogen. It is also more responsive to fertilizers. No signicant effort was made to modify this trait over the subsequent eighty years of breeding. Postwar development of science-intensive agricultural system followed the trajectory set by the former colonial authorities and further locked rice production into this one path.7 During the period of our study, two varieties were favored by Meinung rice farmers: Kaohsiung 145 (145) and Taigeng 2 (). Both have the sturdy stems suitable for mechanical harvesting and the large, round, translucent grains favored by consumers accustomed to japonicas. Both are highly responsive to nitrogen fertilizers, and both are vulnerable to pests and diseases when they are not treated with agrochemicals, though to a lesser degree than earlier strains. They are public-domain breeds bred by the Kaohsiung District Agricultural Research and Extension Station, a branch of the governments Council of Agriculture. Modern agricultural extension services have existed since the colonial period, when Taiwan served as the rice basket of Japan. During World War II, Meinung farmers were also encouraged by the colonial authorities to grow tobacco as part of the war effort. Since those days the dominant cropping pattern has remained rice-ricetobacco: two crops of rice grown between February and October, followed by a winter crop of tobacco. Until the 1990s, tobacco was a relatively protable cash crop with guaranteed purchase contract with the state-owned Taiwan Tobacco and Alcohol Monopoly Bureau.8 Other rural townships with less protable winter crops lost their young people to the cities earlier than Meinung.
inequality. The prominent debate on literature between the Nativists and the Modernists from 1977 to 1978 is now widely regarded as an essential component of contemporary political consciousness in Taiwan. 41 Q2 7 See Tu (1994) and Ka (1995) for analysis of riziculture under Japanese colonialism. 8 42 The 1987 US-Taiwan trade agreement abolished the state tobacco monopoly and allowed import of US tobacco products. The Monopoly Bureau later became a state-owned company. Its contract farming 43 decreased steadily for two decades and was nally abolished in 2008. 40
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Meinungs landscape may look natural to visitors from the cities, but it has been shaped by two centuries of intensive human labor bent on rice cultivation. Dense Hakka villages were built since the rst settlement. This was initially a measure to safeguard the settlers from aboriginal raids, but the spatial arrangement was codied by the government in modern times. Until revisions of the Agricultural Development Act in 2003 and 2007, zoning regulations aiming at protecting vital farmlands strictly separated residential and agricultural zones. Thus, paddies in Meinung spread out as hundreds to thousands of hectares of continuous plots on the plains. Most plots are a uniform rectangular ninety-by-forty-meter shape bordered at least on one side by roads and irrigation ditches. This is a result of the 1980 Farmland Readjustment Actmeant to ensure that every paddy is accessible to large agricultural machines. A vast irrigation system built bit by bit since the eighteenth century and maintained by a government-sponsored county-wide irrigation cooperative ensures plentiful water twice a year during translplanting.9 As in Mukerjis seventeenth-century France (1994), rural Meinung has been made and reshaped by a multitude of historical agents. 5.2 Social Landscape Like the material landscape, the social landscape in Meinung is a result of long-lasting social relations. In 1948, amid the Chinese Civil War, the United States government established with the Guomindang a Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR); this element of Americas foreign aid package was the predecessor to todays Council of Agriculture (COA). The joint commission implemented a rigorous topdown land reform. And, in tandem with the creation of a smallholders society in the countryside, the JCRR created a comprehensive web of agricultural social-technological institutions on the foundation of Japanese colonial agrobureaucracy and agribusiness, including extension stations and agricultural research institutes and university departments. On the technological side, colonial-era experiments in rice breeding continued on the same path, and a state-owned synthetic fertilizer company was established to support the chemical-dependent agricultural system.10 On the social side, farmers were organized into township-level farmers associations. Ostensibly a civic association, the farmers association is closer to a branch of government. Its elected leader is usually considered as politically powerful as the township mayor, and local factional politics often sees politicians switching between these two positions. A farmers association always has at least three departments: credit, supply and marketing, and extension. And it often performs other functions besides. The one in Meinung, for example, operates the annual rice procurement procedure for the COA Agriculture and Food Agency (formerly Provincial Food Bureau). It also markets its own brand-name packaged rice. The farmers association owns a large granary, a grain
9 The water shortages, urban growth, and industrial expansion of recent decades drove the government to divert agricultural water to urban or industrial use, forcing farmers to let their lands lie fallow. This has been a source of constant social conict in rural Taiwan. The anti-dam campaign in Meinung is but one example. 10 Researchers on economic development in Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s often point out that the unequal terms of trade between the state-monopolized synthetic fertilizer and the farmers rice were among the most important means the government used to channel agricultural surplus into industrial sectors. See, e.g., Lee 1971.
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drying center, a large rice mill, a farm supply center, a supermarket, and sundry other real estates. An ofcial estimated that half of the rice produced in Meinung in 2005 was processed through the farmers association. The JCRR implemented a three-pronged rural education program through the extension departments of local farming associations: agronomics education for men, home economics classes for women, and the 4 H Club for youths.11 The expressed goal of the program was to transform family farms into market-oriented, scientically educated, and technologically sophisticated economic entities, thereby modernizing rural society. The programs profound inuence can still be felt: the rst generation of 4 H clubbers now lls the ranks of community elders, and many modern ways of life promoted by the JCRR, such as chemical-dependent agriculture, are now the conventions in rural culture. Besides fostering agrobureaucratic institutions such as the farmers association, JCRR programs also encouraged establishment of commercialized production and distribution of farm supplies, as well as commercialized food processing. Agrochemical retail stores often serve as social nodes in the village where farmers exchange their hands-on knowledge informally over tea (Hsieh 2002). In such settings, the most popular topics for small talk are naturally the pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides sold in the storemany of which have been used by the old farmers since their youth. The privately owned rice mill used to be a prominent center of economic power in Taiwans rice economy, especially through its money-lending business, but the role of millers in todays Meinung is not so conspicuous anymore.
6 A Rice Economy under Threat From the 1950s to 1976, the total area devoted to rice elds in Meinung remained essentially constant at 7,000 to 8,000 hectares, but yields increased (Gaoxiong xian zhengfu 2004). Today, the typical yield of the rst of the three annual crops under Green-Revolution-style conventional production methods is approximately 1,020 kilograms per fen (wet grain), or 10,516 kilograms per hectare for the rst crop of the year. Organic rice usually yields half that amount, at a much higher cost per unit. Despite signicant increases in agricultural productivity, in the third quarter of the twentieth century rural household income was perpetually lower than urban income, due in part to taxes and other policy measures designed to channel agricultural surplus into the industrial sector. This gap was exacerbated by the massive industrial growth of the 1970s. In the late 1970s, the government stopped squeezing and began subsidizing the rural economy, but this did not stop the tide of de-ruralization. As we have already indicated, Meinung did not suffer as much as other townships. But in 1966 alone, 11,156 people emigrated from Meinung and entered the burgeoning job market
11 The 4 H Club is a rural youth organization that originated in the United States in the early twentieth century. In Taiwan, it is administered by the farmers associations. The four Hs stand for head, heart, hand, health. Its youth education programs emphasize hands-on learning of modern science and technology.
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created by the rst export processing zone in the world in nearby Kaohsiung City (Meinung Peoples Association n.d.).12 In the mid-1980s, trade agreements opened up much of the farm produce market to cheaper imports from the United States. This resulted in market crashes in many agricultural sectors, such as fruit and poultry, and triggered the rst wave of farmers protests in the late 1980s. Subsequent trade liberalization during Taiwans bid to enter the World Trade Organization further exacerbated the situation, although government subsidies to various rural programs have grown year by year thanks to the growing importance of electoral politics. In the rst decade of this century, Taiwans rice production is beset by persistently high production costs and the beginning of foreign rice imports. The governments response is twofold. On one hand, COA heightened implementation of subsidized farmland retirement and fallowing plans in order to cut down on rice production. Since 2000 the total farmland area island wide has decreased by approximately 4 percent or 33,000 hectares, and subsidized fallow farmland is expected to reach 270,000 hectares, or approximately one-third of the total arable land, in 2010. Rice cultivation in Meinung has decreased from some 8,000 hectares per season at its peak to approximately 1,000 hectares in recent years (Xingzhengyuan nongye weiyuanhui 2009). On the other hand, local farmers associations and individual farmers are encouraged to market their rice under their own brand name, turning to the boutique market so as to differentiate their product from the imports (Fig. 1). The Meinung Farmers Association, for instance, sells what is called high-quality rice (), emphasizing low pesticide use in the production process. According to a set program of safe use of agrochemicals, no pesticides can be used on a high-quality paddy after the heading stage of growth. High-quality rice can fetch a farm-gate price ranging from NT$20 to $25 per kilogram, and the retail price ranges from NT$35 to $75.13 By comparison, regular rice () grown in the conventional chemical-dependent way and sold through government procurement earns the farmer only NT$16.6 to $21, and the prices offered by private mills are substantially lower.14 The high-quality program covers approximately 16 percent of Meinungs total rice cultivated area. Unlike the picture given by Bain (1993) of the early 1980s, farmers in Meinung are no longer ambivalent about mechanization. Now, with the persistent shortage of hands, almost every farm relies on machines. Most of the labor-intensive processes in rice cultivationseedling growing, plowing, transplanting, harvesting,
12 Many emigrants from Meinung turn out to be high achievers in urban life, especially academically. There is a Meinung Association of PhDs with more than one hundred members. This makes the cultural milieu of the town somewhat distinct from other rural townships, but the distinction is not decisive, as high achievers almost always avoid social and political life at home. 13 The exchange rate from the new Taiwan dollar to the US dollar is at approximately US$ 1 to NT$33 in 2005. Not all rice produced according to high-quality protocols is sold at high-quality prices. The farmers association imposes a quota system on program participants. Yields above the allotted quota have to be sold through conventional channels. Safe use of agrochemicals, as prescribed by the highquality program, does not necessarily result in decreased unit yields, but the meticulous record-keeping and monitoring required do incur additional labor, which some farmers cannot afford. 14 The rice procurement program run by the Council on Agriculture pays NT$21/kg only for rice of designated quality and within an allotted quota. Beyond the quota there are no guarantees. One has to apply before the season begins, and the overall quota is decreasing throughout Taiwan as part of the governments liberalization commitment to the WTO. The farmers association pays less for above-quota rice according to quality of the harvest, and the determination of quality is always a source of dispute.
13
Regular rice (Gov't procurement) Farmer's net revenue 4.5% FA revenue 14.7%
Farm supplies 25.5%
Rent 25.5%
Subcontracted services 29.8% High quality rice (farmers' Assn. marketed) FA revenue 18% Farmer's net revenue 31%
Rent 16%
Farm supplies 16%
Subcontracted services 19%
Fig. 1 Composition of rice wholesale price: conventional production. See Appendix 1
and transportationare now subcontracted to specialized teams of service providers who alone buy the requisite large machines on mortgage from the farmers association credit department. Grain drying in the sun, formerly a common scene, has been completely abandoned. Instead, wet grain is almost always sent to large-scale electric drying centers owned by the farmers association or the millers. Farmers with their own small-scale drying facility for tobacco may also use it for rice. Rice cultivation now requires little labor from the farmers own family members, and running a farm has come to look
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Fig. 2 Packaged rice sold by the Chishang Farmers Association, one of the most successful boutique rice brand names. Photograph by Hsin-Hsing Chen
very much like running an enterprise in Taiwans famed exible-specialized industrial sector.15 Farmers interviewed typically broke down the constituents of their rices wholesale price as shown in Fig. 2. In regular rice production, only a meager 4 percent of the total wholesale price goes to the farmer as his revenue. Despite extremely low protability, most old farmers maintain their conventional pattern of part-time, small-scale, chemical-dependent rice production. In recent years, with crisis looming in the urban job market, many younger people have been willing to return to the farm and have a try at nonconventional, large-scale, specialized farming. Meinungs First Organic Rice Production and Marketing Cooperative Unit is a typical instance of this phenomenon. Since organic rice can fetch a price three or four times that of conventional rice, it can be relatively protable, in spite of much higher associated costs and lower yields. Without trial, no one can be sure whether the potential benet can be realized into a sensible operation.
See Ka (1993) for discussion on the exible specialization of Taiwans industrial sector and its linkages with the peasant culture.
15
7 Establishment of the Cooperative People began the basic work of founding Meinungs organic rice cooperative in spring 2005 amidst a milieu of rural cultural renewal movement. Formally founded in September that year, this cooperative functioned from the spring crop of 2006 until late 2009. A series of social-technical obstacles surfaced during its operation and eventually convinced the cooperatives members to give up. From the very tangible materiality of the rice seed to family relationships, the hegemony of chemical-dependent agriculture, which has roots deep in local culture, had prevailed. In the early 1990s, residents of Meinung rose up in protest against a big dam project. The proposed reservoir was designed to supply water to petrochemical plants and steel mills that were planning to expand their capacity many fold. Local intellectuals played a crucial role in the anti-dam campaign, using vernacular images laden with nostalgia as a powerful publicity weapon. The Meinung Peoples Association was founded during that protest. After the dam project was halted, the association turned into a nongovernmental organization concerned with the preservation and promotion of local culture. That was during an island-wide wave of community cultural renewal movement that involved both grassroots initiatives and government sponsorship. The Meinung Peoples Association became a prominent player in that movement. Although the image of rural life is instrumental to the associations activities and most activists are from farm households, agricultural issues had never been directly addressed by the organization until the period of our research. In the late 1990s, after years of popular campaign for educational reform, the government set up a system of community universities () throughout Taiwan. Taking liberation of knowledge as their motto, the community universities are autonomous adult learning institutions that are partly funded by the local government. Its curricula include practical skill training, academic subjects, and organizing of community civic groups. These schools were meant to offer a highly nonhierarchical liberal education free from any preconceived rigid frameworks shaped by the state and the market. Some have survived for more than a decade and become well rooted in their communitiesthey do best in urban middle-class areasand they remain, to varying degrees, faithful to their original goals. Many, however, have degenerated into subsidy-farming operations by businesses with good political connections. Against this background, activists from the Meinung Peoples Association founded Chi-Mei Community University () in 2001: it drew students from both Meinung and Chishan, a neighboring township. At its inception, the leading organizers vowed to create a rural-type community university. However, recruitment of non-middle-class students and developing new curricula suitable to the rural setting has always been challenging. In 2005, two farmers active in the university created an eleven-member organic farming team. This was based on their previous two years of small-scale experiment following methods and principles of organic agriculture promoted by various Buddhist charities, such as the Tse-Xin Organic Agriculture Foundation (), and other advocates. Although the team attracted considerable publicity, it had only only 5.5 jia (5.33 ha) to work with and could only be considered a preliminary effort. Indeed, from production to marketing, the group ran into countless obstacles. The three core members decided to recruit more farmers and organize a proper production and marketing
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cooperative unit, with an aim to expand production on a collective basis and to make organic rice farming a feasible source of livelihood. The Meinung First Organic Rice Production and Marketing Cooperative Unit, duly afliated with the local farmers association, was ofcially founded in September 2005. The twelve founding members were farmers aged between forty and fty. From the outset the group encountered difcultiesa host of internal disagreements and external pressures. Collectivizing production, although a founding principle, proceeded very slowly and haphazardly, starting with a few purchases and some sales, then the acquisition of a number of collectively owned machines. Then things started to improve. In 2007 the Kaohsiung County government decided to set up a special organic agriculture zone on land owned by the Taiwan Sugar Corporation that was lying fallow.16 The Meinung cooperative was invited to use 7.8 jia free of charge. But the generous offer proved costly. Turning sugarcane eld into paddy consumed much of the groups collectively accumulated cash reserve. The cooperative decided to grow some organic vegetables, which is supposed to bring fast cash turnover, to solve the cash ow problem. But building the required net rooms cost yet another enormous sum even with a government subsidy. In late 2009, serious cash ow imbalance forced the cooperative to cease collective operations and transfer its collective assets to a private companyalong with the debt. Organic rice cultivation in Meinung has now reverted to individual household production. The four-year history of the Meinung cooperative, though it ended in failure, permits us to understand the interwoven elements of a hegemonic Green Revolution system that poses serious challenges to organic farmers.
8 Seeds, Fertilizer, and Machines Materiality embodies social relations. By setting out paths for human activities, materiality reproduces existing relations. Seeds, fertilizer, and machinesthese interconnected material elements regulate how rice is produced in Meinung. The machinerys specications conne organic farmers to a very narrow range of options in virtually every aspect of production: rice strain, equipment, plant nutrient, and so on. Furthermore, these material elements are not merely things waiting to be employed; they are linked to human beings in a web of social relations. Challenging technical conventions in rice farming, therefore, cannot but challenge social conventions. These conventions constitute a crucial part of the hegemony of the Green Revolution system. Yang (2001) has persuasively portrayed a Taiwanese agrarian milieu that is friendly to technological innovation: production of high-priced fruit such as the
16 Taiwan Sugar Corporation is a state-owned company created after 1945 by nationalizing the companies previously owned by the Japanese. At its height in the 1950s, sugarcane production occupied 100,000 hectares and exports of rened sugar were the second largest source of foreign currency after aid from the United States. Upon entry to the WTO, the Taiwanese government saw to it that local sugar production was drastically cut: less than 10,000 hectares are devoted to the crop today. Taiwan Sugar Corporation has become the largest owner of fallowed farmland in Taiwan, and their property is often used to implement various government projects.
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wax apple (Syzygium samarangense). Individual farmers inquisitiveness and keenness to experiment, likely a legacy of the 4 H Club, combined with the collegial atmosphere of the village social life, fostered intensive knowledge sharing and hastened agricultural innovation. This is not likely to happen with rice. Virtually all rice varieties readily available to farmers (including those grown by the Meinung organic rice cooperative) are bred by government-run agricultural research and extension stations. This led to a complex set of problems. Selecting and saving seeds from ones own harvest as a way to adapt the plant to the local environment, once a universal practice worldwide, is vigorously advocated by many organic farming organizations. After decades of subscribing to the Green Revolution practice of buying fresh seed annually, some vegetable farmers who have turned toward organic now regularly save seed. And they trade strains suitable for various styles of organic agriculture. But saving seed for organic rice cultivation is still rare. Those who do it are highly conscientious organic farmers who favor indica varieties, which have a longer history of cultivation in Taiwan and are therefore hardier. Rice seeds, particularly those of the japonica strains, are still rmly within the domain of the state-rice complex. These were bred in state-owned laboratories from the very beginningand continue to be. As mentioned earlier, the rst japonica variety bred in Taiwan was produced under the Japanese colonial government. Today, research and extension stations around Taiwan continue to propagate cultivars and produce rice seed. The latter are sent to subcontracted growers for mass production, and the seed they produce is sent through the farmers association to commercial nurseries to grow into seedlings ready for the farmers to transplant. Today, there are ten nurseries in Meinung, down from around twenty in the height of rice production in the 1970s (Lao Xie eld-Saicb). Like most rice farmers in the area, the Meinung organic rice cooperative chose to grow two varieties of japonicas: Kaohsiung 145 and Taigeng 2. The decision was out of their hands, since without choosing these two (readily provided by local commercial nurseries), they could not nd mechanized transplanting teams even to have their farm started. Unless a farmer would like to keep his own nursery and transplant the seedlings by hand, as in the past, the only way to have a eld planted is to buy seedlings from commercial nurseries. None of the farming households today have sufcient labor power to do the planting the old way. It is also nancially inhibiting to hire labor for such practice. Transplanting service providers can buy seedlings from the nurseries for the farmers and save them a lot of effort. The seedlings bought from nurseries come in standard trays, measuring 58 by 28 by 3 centimeters (Figs. 3 and 4). This is required for the transplanting machines. Theoretically it is possible for farmers to grow seedlings on the standard trays themselves and still utilize a mechanized transplanter, as Bain (1993) observed in the early 1980s. Today, however, doing this is not socially desirable. Most operators of plowing and transplanting services collaborate with certain nurseries, whose seedlings come as part of the packaged service. Nurseries, in turn, have stable collaborative relationships with the township farmers associations that supply seed for the government. Subcontracting mechanized planting services, therefore, entails a series of actions eventually connecting the farm to the chain of agrobureaucracy of the staterice regime. Under such circumstances, if a farmer was to grow his or her own seed-
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Fig. 3 Seedlings ready for mechanical transplanting. Photograph by Kuei-Mei Lo
lings, this could upset the operators of the local transplanting team and their business associates, who might refuse to provide services. Growing japonica varieties organically leads to increased fertilizer costs. The high nitrogen demand of such varieties is met by conventional farmers with urea, ammonium sulfate, and other common, inexpensive, nitrogen-rich synthetic fertilizers. Commercially available organic fertilizers, usually factory-produced composts, are never as high in nitrogen content. Slow-release nutrients from compost also result in slower and uneven responses from rice plants like Kaohsiung 145. More fertilizer is thus required to maintain adequate nitrogen for the growth of the plant. The fertilizer needed for one fen (1/10 jia) of paddy is approximately NT$700 for a conventional farmer but NT$2,000 for an organic farmer. A Zheng, an organic compost producer and farmers right activist, told us: In principle, every farmer can produce his own organic fertilizer. In reality, without the necessary machinery and equipment, small farmers cannot mass produce compost and cut down on unit costs. Organic fertilizer production needs certain economies of scale, achieved through an integrated factory, for instance. Once the investment is made, the factory also needs its equipment to run without too much downtime, in order to have a decent return on the investment. Thats the only way to drive down the cost of fertilizers. (A Zheng eld-Rabac) In comparison with industrial production, the cost of homemade compost appears uneconomical for individual farmers. A shortage of household labor simply rules it out. There are many certied commercial brands of organic fertilizers made by large-
Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Fig. 4 Mechanical transplanting in Meinung. Photograph by Kuei-Mei Lo
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scale manufacturers of either cooking oil or animal feedall from soybeans and maize imported from the United States. The fertilizer is a leftover from the industrial process. This casts doubt on exactly how organic is the organic produce, if the essential raw material is byproduct of conventional agribusiness. Yet another factor limiting the organic farmers choice of rice breed is how harvesting is carried out. Since the 1960s rice breeding in Taiwan has been aimed at adapting the plant to the use of combine harvesterssturdier stems, homogeneous plant height, and so on. And, indeed, virtually every rice farmer hires a team to harvest his or her elds using combines, and suitable plants have become essential. Every harvest season, the teams of combines started their work in southern Taiwan and work their way north. Wet grains are packaged on site to be transported to the drying center. The sacks, again, are standardized in size to facilitate subsequent processing. In drying and milling, the organic rice farmers are faced with a distinct problem: mixing with conventional rice. Most organic certication organizations require that the machines be cleaned of conventional rice before processing organic rice to prevent mixing. However, grain dryers and mills in both the farmers association facility and private rice mills are large. With small harvests, it is difcult for the organic rice cooperative members to ask the mill operators, who want their machinery to operate continuously in line with the harvesting schedule, to halt and clean the line before processing the organic grains. The cooperative tried several ways to tackle this problem: using equipment at the research and extension station, buying their own smallscale milling machine and running it day and night, and using social connections to persuade private mills to process their grain. None of these were satisfactory.
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Members of the cooperative estimated that they spend at least three hundred person-hours of combined labor just to dry one harvest (Xiao Bai, eld-Taecd). Before the cooperative is formally organized, organic farmers borrow equipment at the local agricultural research and extension stations, but they have to wait in a long queue for this. Upon its formation, the cooperative decided to buy one small, secondhand milling machine with its fund, and the four elected ofcials of the cooperative took turns to operate the machine for the whole collective. The unexpectedly in efciency of the machine and long hours of drudgery later resulted in protests from the ofcials. So the leader of the cooperative decided to subcontract the milling to an owneroperator of drying machine who also has a medium-size milling machine. His machine, however, did not work as well as those at the farmers association and the large mills. There is some husk and broken rice in the nished product; members of the cooperative did not like its appearance (Xiao Tao eld-Vaccb). In every step from plowing the paddy to milling the harvest, years of mechanization and specialization have constructed a set of rigid specications for rice farming. Breeds, fertilizers, and use of all kinds of machinery have to conform to what is prevalent in the community, and this social environment is not friendly toward organic rice production. These interconnected technological artifacts are each represented by socially established actors in the system of production and consumption. As a result, it is impossible to have changes only on technology without changing the existing conguration of social power.
9 Marketing and Certication The organic farmers choice of conventional Green Revolution strains implies that organic rice is not materially distinguishable from conventional rice, thus the organic label of the product has to be backed up by a marketing and certication system that can generate consumer trust. Marketing is always burdening farmers with advanced agricultural technology and thus the problem of overproduction. Difculty in distribution is one of the most important problems that propelled members of the Meinung organic rice cooperative to decide to collectivize in the rst place. In spite of consumer enthusiasm for organic produce, the existing distribution channels in Taiwan are far from adequate for both producers and consumers. In recent years, some NGOs have acquired sufcient public credibility for them to inspect, monitor, and certify produce as organic. However, the certication process is costly, and the high fee cuts into the producers income. On top of this stressful situation, big corporations are increasingly involved in the organic market and threatening future sustainability of individual household farms. Direct sale from the producer to the consumer is the channel most favored by organic advocates such as the community universities and the Meinung Peoples Association, as there appears to be no proteering by intermediary merchants. In the experimental stage of the Meinung organic rice cooperative in 2005, a small amount of rice was sold directly to individual consumers through personal contacts and some help from organizations such as the teachers associations. Through these means, the producer secures 55 percent of the retail price. At that time, the problem was high delivery cost for small orders. If transportation was added to the price of an
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order of less than 20 kilograms, the unit price would be higher than what the organic produce shops in the city charged. Even though the farmers eventually paid for the delivery themselves, it still took months for them to sell the harvest through direct sale. The cooperative members have calculated that at least ve jia of cultivation area are needed in order for a farmer to make a living on rice production. Direct sales, therefore, were far from enough for the cooperative to become economically sustainable. Indeed, after the founding of the cooperative, direct sales never accounted for much more than 20 percent of the collective harvest, the rest was often sold at a discount price to charity organizations after stockpiling for months (Xiao Bai eld-Vacbf ). One alternative to direct sale, in which consumer trust is based on personal contacts, is organic certication. Betting the trend of liberalization, the Council of Agriculture does not operate organic certication itself. Instead, the 2007 Farm Produce Production and Certication Act requires that the ministry set regulations and accredit private organizations, both for-prot and nonprot, to issue organic certications. So far, twelve entities have been certied: two universities, three biotechnology companies, and six civic organizations. Among them, by far the biggest is the Tse-Xin Organic Agriculture Foundation, whose certied produce is sold by many mainstream supermarket chains as well as the Li-Ren Organic Produce Shop, a retail chain owned by the foundation itself. One organic rice farmer in Meinung went through Tse-Xins certication process, hoping to have his rice marketed commercially. He found the cost of certication a heavy burden. Some fees were charged only once every three years, such as those assessed for testing his farms soil and water for heavy metals. Others were once every ve years, such as the licensing fee. Even so, all those fees, combined and spread across several years, amounted to at least NT$4,700 per year. Added to the cost of organizational endorsement was the price difference charged by the retail department of Tse-Xin. In total, the NGO received 42 percent of the retail price, while the farmer got only 28 percent, a sharp contrast to direct sales. (See Fig. 5.) Aside from COA accredited certication organizations such as Tse-Xin, there are other civic organizations in Taiwan that are not ofcially accredited but still highly trusted for their own certication process. The biggest among them is the Homemakers Union and Foundation. This is a consumers cooperative founded in the 1980s by a group of environmentally conscious middle-class women. It has a functioning national ofce and branches in all major cities. The Homemakers Union and Foundation is reputedly more concerned with farmers economic sustainability than other organizations; monthly members magazines always features reports on farmers and agricultural issues. The group also offers many exposure programs that permit urban members to experience farm work themselves and get to know professional farmers. Trust, in the strategy of the Homemakers Union and Foundation (HUF), is not built by the ofcial certication process but generated from personal contacts. But the size of its operation is still quite small. In 2006 HUF certied 30 hectares of rice paddy as organic, a fraction of the 260 hectares certied that year (Manager Shih speech20070731). Meinungs organic rice cooperative was not certied by the Homemakers Union and Foundation. The uncertainty in marketing is inhibiting farmers from taking up organic agriculture. By comparison, conventional rice cultivation, unprotable as it is, is much less laborious for the farmers. Sometimes a private rice mill cooperates with the harvest
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Organic rice, direct sale Rent 13%
Farmer's revenue 55%
Subcontracted services 15%
Farm supplies 12.% Processing and packaging 5% Organic rice, NGO certified Farmer's revenue 28% NGO revenue 33%
Processing and packaging 5% Rent 11% Farm supplies 10% Subcontracted services 13%
Fig. 5 Composition of rice wholesale price: organic. See Appendix 1
team to purchase a farmers total harvest beforehand. A representative of the mill will come to the eld to estimate the quality and quantity of the yield, and make a lumpsum offer to the farmer. If the offer is accepted, the farmer will not need to be bothered with anything afterward. Organic farmers have no such convenient services. Marketing is as laborious as production. The founding of the Meinung cooperative was intended to share the burden among members, thus achieving economies of scale not only in production but also in marketing. But it did not achieve such a scale before it ceased to operate.
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Several big business conglomerates in Taiwan are beginning to operate their own organic produce business. Among them, the biggest are: the Formosa Plastic Group (), the petrochemical giant; Uni-President Enterprise Corporation ( ), the biggest food processing company and owner of the omnipresent 7 Eleven convenience store chain; and the YFY Paper Group (), the biggest paper and pulp maker in Taiwan. They do not have the problem in marketing and certication, as they can afford the publicity campaign needed to establish the necessary degree of consumer trust. This is yet another looming threat to organic family farms.
10 The Hegemony of the Green Revolution System By far the biggest obstacle felt by members of the Meinung organic rice cooperative is social pressure from their community, their families, even their partners in community organizations. Here the Green Revolution displays its most hegemonic character. Even though conventional rice farming has long ceased to be protable for small farmers, many still hold rm convictions about how farming is supposed to be done, convictions that were formed and repeatedly reafrmed during the decades of success along the Green Revolution route. To some, organic farming is a childish illusion. To others, it is irresponsible. Yet others believe in the value of organic farming but disagree with the collective approach. Just as labor process theorists observed on various industrial shop oors in their case studies, a strong atmosphere of competition exists among Meinung farmers. This is a culture the JCRR programs sought to foster, and it amplies all of the criticisms aimed at organic farming. This is not merely a product of interpersonal conicts, but also concrete material conditions, particularly when it comes to land-lease contracts. Jing-Hui, a member of the Chi-Mei Community University organic farming team, described her experience in an article she wrote for The Sprout (Qing yaer ): When they run into these people who claim to grow rice without pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, farmers in the neighborhood always watch in silence. They never say much. Among villagers, silence is a form of speech. It means: Lets see what these young people are up to. They are silent because they dont know us well, and regard it as rude to be too inquisitive. They pass by our paddy every day, and they always give it just a glance. Maybe, after ten times or more, they cannot restrain their curiosity any more. After all, it has been decades since the village last saw people in their twenties and thirties working in the paddy as a group. Finally, they stop and ask: Are you doing an experiment for the research and extension station? Actually, there are countless question marks in their minds: Is it protable? Is the water clean enough? How can you get a crop without pesticides? (Chiu Jing-Hui 2005). Jing-Hui can take the skepticism lightheartedly: its just part of an interaction with the elders. A Fu, an older man and a leading member of the Meinung Production and Marketing Cooperative Unit, is less cheerful. He just cannot ignore the taunts implied in the neighbors questions. He can manage to reply to questions such as How is the organic way possible? Plants nowadays just dont grow without pesticides! After all,
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a single successful harvest is all it takes to answer that one. Another kind of question, however, is harder to cope with: Is it worthwhile? The cost is so high. Even though you get a better price for your rice, it takes you a long time to sell it. Besides, you have to haul your grain around from one place to another. Isnt it too much trouble? And once the crop shows signs of trouble, rumors quickly y around the village, and people start to say, See? I told you so! (A Fu, rec-Vacca [DS_20010]). During our interview, A Fu said: My father is in his seventies now. He still grows a small plot of regular rice. My father always tells me to stop growing organic rice. He says, Your prots are all eaten up by labor costs. You recover your investment little by little when someone buys a pack or two from you. Your money is spread all over. There is no big money. Your kind of money wont make you a man. Look at me, my rice is sold [to intermediary merchants] when it is still wet in the eld. But you, you even do your own drying, staying up all night to check the drying machine. You are working yourself to death. It is natural for a parent to worry about this. And my father was very angry when he said this. (A Fu, rec-Vacca [DS_20010]) Aside from worrying parents, understandably, the most vocal opponents to organic farming are the pesticide dealers. Unfortunately for the organic farmers, the thirty agrochemical supply stores in Meinung happen to be the site where many social gatherings take place. Thus, their opinions will be broadcasted far and wide in the community. Besides, some of their arguments do make sense. One pesticide dealer A Ming argued, during our interview, that organic farming in Taiwan is either hoax or folly. He put his reasons as the following: First of all, there is no uncontaminated source of water. Even if the river is not contaminated by factories and big pig farms nearby, the Bureau of Forestry have done regular air spray of chemicals in the mountains upstream for decades. Second, after fty years of chemical-intensive farming, no farmland has clean, chemical-free soil anymore. Third, the consumers still prefer good-looking produce without insect bites. And fourth, in the hot, humid climate in Taiwan, chemical-free pest control is virtually impossible. (A Ming, eldSaeaf [b]) These facts pointed out by A Ming imply that a successful switch to organic agriculture cannot be achieved by farmers alone. Many costs need to be accounted for by different government authorities: the cost of prolonged farmland fallowing, of pollution control, of the rehabilitation of forests and rivers, and so on. Any single task requires the cooperation of different government agencies and is beyond the capacity of farmers, as individuals or as a collective. Opposition to organic farming sometimes leads to unbearable personal tensions and anxiety. In the milieu of technological-intensive agriculture that has permeated the community since the time of JCRR programs, plant growth in any individual farm is a subject for neighborhood scrutiny. The 4-H Club trained farmers in their seventies have grown accustomed to all kinds of competition since their youth, as this is the central theme of 4-H training. Criticism of the slow growth and shabby appearance of an organic paddy, when heard by the organic farmers elders, are often taken as a
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suggestion of irresponsibility and disgrace. Many cooperative members experienced harsh scolding from their parents and complaints from spouses. Adding to the sense of humiliation is the fact that organic farming is actually much more labor intensive, and the economic yield more uncertain. Signicant investments in money and labor (not just manual, but mental and interpersonal as well) can be spent in vain. To avoid calamitous outcomes, the organic rice cooperative recruited only nancially comfortable members. Low-level community acceptance of organic farming has translated into real problem with regard to leasing land. As mentioned above, most family holdings are too small for economically feasible operations, and leasing additional land is necessary. Most existing farmlands in Meinung are grouped into areas of hundreds to up to 2,000 jia each. In order to avoid chemical contamination from adjacent plots, an organic farm is preferably situated on the edge of a farmland area, not in the middle. Otherwise, a buffer zone at least four meters wide must be created; this simply adds to the nancial burden. However, with the government fallowing subsidy, renting out land is optional for smallholders. The good will of the landowner has to be secured before an organic farmer can win a lease. Yet with the reputation of organic farming as childish play that circulates in the community, such goodwill is hard to come by. Indeed, it took a lot of effort for the organic farmers to persuade the landowners, usually their kin elders, before suitable land could be obtained for planting (Xiao Bai eld-Saiaf). Community activists at the Meinung Peoples Association and other civic organizations are much friendlier to the idea of organic farming. However, many of them disagreed with the collectivization approach took by the PCMU. Individuality, it turned out, was so central in the mindset of some activists, that they regard joining a collective as subordination to an authority, and a betrayal of the Nativist vernacular vision of a rural life characterized by independent family farms. They prefer the slogan self-produced, self-marketed over the PMCUs expressed mission: collective production and marketing. A member of the PMCU commented on the disagreement: A Shan [an activist] doesnt think its good idea for the PMCU to buy machinery. He is worried that the collective will grow so big that it no longer has a human face, and the communication with consumers will be ignored. But we deliver to the consumers ourselves, and we talk to them when we make our delivery. So I dont think this is inevitably a problem. On the other hand, I believe those who question whether we should buy machines has never been working on a milling shop oor. They would say so because they dont understand the hardship (Interviewee A fTaebd). Such different opinions need not be counterproductive, if open and congenial debates could take place among activists and organic farmers. However, as in most grassroots organizing campaigns, consensus building and collective decision making was an arduous and frustrating process, and the PMCU did not fare better than other organizations in Taiwan. With few opportunities for open debate, disagreements translated into rumors about nancial impropriety and other personal attacks. The fundamental values of collectivization are also under question.
26 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43
Another member of the PMCU described the tension among activists and organic farmers over the issue of the collective: Six months after the cooperative was formed, Yang Zheng (an activist) asked A Fu, Will you go work with A Bi (the PMCU leader), if he decides to plant on the land of Taiwan Sugar? A Fu replied, Of course. I am with the cooperative. If the leader and other members decide to go, Ill go. Yang Cheng later commented to others. He said, A Fu has to reconsider where he stands, because following a leader is like being a hired hand. He will be working for A Bi. I dont like this comment. I dont think its a boss-employee relationship. A Fu was shocked when he heard this. But he wouldnt say anything. He doesnt want the argument to go out of hand. (Interviewee B, rVacca) Such tensions were heightened when the government support nally came along in the form of free land provided by the county. With substantial capital investment made available to the organic rice PCMU, issues about equitable rights in internal decision making, division of labor, and distribution of revenues became not only highly relevant but also stressful.
11 Questions of Policy At the macro-level, government support for organic agriculture in Taiwan is quite meager compared to spending on GR institutions and other items of rural development. Sufce it to say, this is in a sharp contrast to the organic-friendly discourse used by virtually every elected ofcial and head of government agency. Since the rst wave of farmers protests in the late 1980s, the Taiwan government has instituted a series of livelihood support policy measures for individual farmers such as farmers insurance, subsidized health insurance, and pensions for elderly farmers. These measures took up a large proportion of COA budgets: NT$4.2 billion, or 44.6% of the total budget in 2007 (Xingzhengyuan nongye weiyuanhui 2008). The second largest item is the fallow subsidy. Unlike during the Green Revolution era, the government now spends more to discourage rather than support agricultural production. In production support, particularly in policy measures aiming at transforming conventional agriculture, resources allotted for organic agriculture is quite small. From 2002 to 2006, the budget for organic agriculture programs varied between NT$19 and NT$31 million. Those programs only covered information campaigns and technical services such as soil testing. There is no production support for organic farming similar to the conventional agriculture support programs administered by the farmers association system. By comparison, programs for leisure agriculture, another approach to agricultural transformation, consistently took up more than NT$600 million. Those include large sums for public construction and tourism programs; most of them are subcontracted to private contractors. Apparently, tourism takes priority over organic farming in the rural renewal policy in Taiwan. The seemingly odd distribution of agricultural budgets over different programs makes sense in the context of electoral politics in Taiwan since the 1990s. Direct cash payments to voters, in forms such as the elderly farmers pension, are the crudest and
27
most efcient ways to secure votes. Farmers associations and other related agricultural institutions are so well-connected and politically powerful that the Green Revolution production support they administer is barely touchable. And public construction projects are already a well-established channel to deliver public funds to the hands of powerful local political players, virtually all of whom have their own construction business and are inuential in local farmers associations.
12 Conclusion In spite of the drastic decrease in rice production brought about by the World Trade Organizations trade deregulations, the old state-rice complex remains alive and well in Taiwan. Rice is still largely in the hands of the Green Revolution system even while production has been drastically cut to comply with free-trade policies. Hegemony is maintained and reproduced not by coercive means but through the material conditions of capitalist production and consumption. Those are the result of historically shaped actions of human agency, embodied in machines, seeds, plant behavior, the landscape, and so on. These material conditions compose a technological system in which many social forces have a vested interest. In a rice-growing area that has undergone GR-related social transformation, such as modern-day Meinung, perennial shortage of labor power makes agricultural machinery a necessity for most farm households. A tight cooperative relationship between machine service providers and the seedling production system connes farmers choices of cultivar to those that are designed for GR-style cultivation and provided by the state-rice complex. Built-in traits of the plant demand specic amounts and composition of nutrients, which puts the organic method at a disadvantage. Plants that do not grow well cause criticism and social pressure from a community that is accustomed to judging ones achievement by the GR standards. In the free-market ethos, todays organic farmers do not have anything comparable to the comprehensive statesponsored technical-social support system that has made the Green Revolution a resounding success in the past. All these combined pose formidable challenge to organic farmers. Low volume of the organic rice production made the material constraints even more pronounced in every stage, from seed supply and grain production to processing and marketing. The experience of Meinungs First Organic Rice Production and Marketing Cooperative Unit has shown how extensive and tenacious the Green Revolution style state-rice complex is in todays Taiwan. Established by USAID in the 1950s and having undergone decades of adaptation to rural depopulation and mechanization, the Green Revolution based rice production and consumption is entrenched in many social and technological layers: landscape, seed breeding, specication of machinery, patterns of social life, social norms, and politics. The reason may be that rice has been so central to the US-led post World War II rural reconstruction projects of countries like Taiwan, and the projects were so successful, hence the technological momentum so strong. Unlike the Green Revolution strategy that aims at producing very tangible material increases in production volumes, the term organic relies much more on social construction, a system of consumer trust, and a carved-out market niche. This is especially
28 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43
salient when, as in the case of organic rice in Taiwan, identical varieties are cultivated both by organic and conventional farmers and the material quality of the products are not readily distinguishable. Thus, a social system of support is even more vital for organic farmers than for farmers following the established conventional way. In this regard, there is an ethos in organic farming in Taiwan that is particular to the era of laissez-faire neoliberalism: little government intervention and many diverse initiatives from individual producers, civic organizations, and corporations. Corporate dominance in this eld is not yet as powerful as critics of globalization have feared, although there are signs that this may be on its way. Success stories about organic farming in Taiwan abound. Some networks of connection between organic producers and consumers are established. The HUF is but one such example. More and more individuals and groups are trying out various techniques in production, distribution, and organization of organic agriculture. However, the vast majority of successes so far are in income-elastic commodities such as vegetable and fruit, where previous government regulation and support has been less intensive, full-edged commercialization has occurred earlier, and technological momentum is smaller. Hughes has suggested that technological systems with substantial momentum do not change direction easily. True as this may be analytically, its practical implications can be quite fatalistic. Those who devote themselves to the day-to-day operations of movements such as organic agriculture, proactive engagements are still necessary in order to creative conditions for a counterhegemonic project and for a later successful social transformation, even while they are lucidly aware that their actions can only be a part of the solution. In the case of Taiwan, where a system of state-owned socialtechnical institutions for agriculture remain intact and effective, at least in the service of the Green Revolution paradigm, it is vitaland possibleto translate the goodwill of the public toward organic agriculture into concrete policy measures. Today onethird of Taiwans arable land is deliberately lying fallow and conventional agriculture is constantly in crisis, material conditions exist for an alternative strategy. If alternative paths are to be opened up, farmers, consumers, activists, and advocates need to unite for coherent and systematic political action. Appendix 1: Estimated Price Composition of Rice, First Crop, 2005 Actual business accounts kept by family farms are difcult to access in Meinung, as in most rural societies. In this study, we used estimated data volunteered by one interviewed farmer to construct a typical account in each of the four categoriesgovernment-procured regular rice, high-quality rice marketed by the farmers association, organic rice sold directly, and organic rice sold through certication organizations. Then, if additional sources were available, these gures were triangulated in order to approximate actual numbers, or at least widely agreed average numbers. For example, gures in the farmers association operations were revised with information provided by interviewed ofcials from their own records. We used gures for farm supplies provided by three interviewed storekeepers and several farmers. Tables made using these preliminary ndings were then presented to farmers and community members in our four report meetings. Those present assessed our estimates and discussed how they should be revised to approach their perceived reality. The end result, therefore, approximates a consensus of those who participated in the study.
Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Rent Farm supplies Fertilizer Agrochemicals 700 1,370 Subtotal 3,000 (25.5%) Set price, will be accounted for as opportunity cost when the land is self-ownedd Subcontracted services Subtotal 1,734.05 (14.7%) Tillage and land leveling Transplanting Water monitoring Harvesting Seedlings 600 1,000c 800 930 30 pans @ (28 for seedlings 3 for transportation) 930 Average estimation 1,100 market price Administrative fee 38.25 Storage 91.8 0.765 tons (dry grain) @ 15/ton/month for 8 monthsb 91.8 0.765 tons (dry grain) @ 50/ton 38.25 Milling 456.5 Item FA revenue Drying Yield per fen (avg): 1,020 kg wet grain 75% drying ratea 765 kg dry grain 66.3% milling rate 507 kg milled rice Amount (NT$, percentage in parenthesis) 1147.5 Table 1 Price Composition: Regular Rice, Government Procurement
29
Per the customary usage in rural Taiwan, all gures are estimated based on yield per fen, i.e., 0.097 hectare. The estimate was made in August 2005 for that years rst crop; second crops usually yield less. The four discussion sessions took place between September and December 2005.
Calculation 765 kg (dry grain) @ 1.5/kg 1147.5 (paid for by the farmer) 0.507 tons (milled rice) @ 900/ton 456.5 Paid for by COA directly to the FA
Subtotal 3,500 (29.8%)
Subtotal 3,000 (25.5%)
30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Procurement price paid by COA TABLE 1 continued Farmers net revenue Subtotal 524.5 (4.5%) e Total 11758.55 (100 %)
Procurement price per fen (NT$, price and amount [in dry grain] set for different COA programs) Planned purchase 192 kg @ 21/kg 4,032 Guidance purchase 120 kg @ 18/kg 2,160 Surplus purchase 300 kg @ 16.6/kg 4,980 Subtotal paid to the farmer 11,172 f Milling 456.5 Storage 91.8 Administrative fee 38.25 Subtotal paid to the farmers association 586.55 Total 11,172 586.55 11,758.55
Notes: a Farmers association sets the drying rate requirement at 72 78 percent. We used the mean gure for our estimates. b Eight months is the average storage time of dry grain in the farmers association granary before it is milled and shipped to COA-designated wholesalers. c This is the only task in eld management that is sometimes subcontracted, especially by part-time farmers who have other jobs and little time. Intermittent tasks such as pesticide spraying can be done by a part-time farmer on his/her spare time. d This is the rent for the rst crop. Rent for second crop is usually set at NT$2,000 per fen. But most farmland leases are for the period of whole years. e This meager gure can appear counterintuitive to many conventional farmers. Farmers who rely solely on the conventional rice production tend to be older in age and therefore cannot hold on to steady nonfarm jobs. Thus they would not count in the NT$1,000 labor cost for water monitoring. Similarly, they tend to keep smaller plots and often do not rent lands. The rent, therefore, will not be accounted for as opportunity cost. In this context, cost and benet of rice farming is not an independent fact but is tied up with the social fabric. f Assuming the remaining 153 kg is not sold but left for household consumption.
Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Farmers net revenue Wholesale price Rent Farm supplies Fertilizer Agrochemicals 700 1,370 Subtotal 3,000 (16.0%) Subtotal 5,800 (30.9%) Total 18742.5 (100%) Set price, will be accounted for as opportunity cost when the land is self-owned FA purchase price 1020 kg wet grain @ 15 15,300 Total 535.5 kg @ 35b 18742.5 Subcontract services FA net revenue Tillage and land leveling Transplanting Water monitoring Harvesting Seedlings 600 1,000 800 930 30 pans @ (28 for seedlings 3 for transportation) 930 Average estimationa 2,295 1,100 market price Item FA revenue Drying Milling, storage and administration Yield per fen (avg.): 1,020 kg wet grain 75% drying rate 765 kg dry grain 70% milling rate 535.5 kg milled rice Amount (NT$, percentage in parenthesis) 1,147.5 negligible Table 2 Price Composition: High-Quality Rice, Sold by the Farmers Association
31
Calculation 765 kg (dry grain) @ 1.5/kg 1147.5 (for internal accounting purpose only) Facility, equipment, staff, and other factors are shared with the government procurement operation, and the costs are usually borne by the former.
Subtotal 3442.5 (18.4%)
Subtotal 3,500 (18.7%)
Subtotal 3,000 (16.0%)
Notes. a High-quality rice does not differ from regular rice in the amount of agrochemicals used during growth. The main distinction is regulated timing of application. b High-quality rice is packaged and sold at ve different grades according to FA-assessed quality; prices range from NT$75 to NT$35 per kg. Awardwinning rice in the annual competition can get even higher price, but the chance is small. We use the minimum price for estimation because this represents the majority of high-quality rice.
32 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Retail price Farmers net revenue Subtotal 12,914 (55.2%) Total 23,400 (100%) Storage, sales, delivery, and administration Subtotal 1206 (5.2%) Negligible Packaging 141 Processing and packaging Milling 390 Subtotal 2,780 (11.9%) Drying 675 Organic fertilizer 1,850 Farm supplies Subcontracted services Transplanting Water monitoring Harvesting Subtotal 3,500 (15.0%) Seedlings 930 600 1,000 800 Tillage and land leveling 1,100 Item Rent Yield per fen: 450 kg wet graina 85% drying rate 360 kg dry grain 68% milling rate 260 kg milled rice Amount (NT$, percentage in parenthesis) Subtotal 3,000 (12.8%) Table 3 Price Composition: Organic Rice, Direct Sale
Calculation Set price, will be accounted for as opportunity cost when the land is self-owned Market price
30 pans @ (28 for seedlings 3 for transportation) 930 Base 6 following 3 heading 1/4 sacks @ 200 1850 450 kg wet grain @ 1.5 675 260 kg milled rice @ 1.5 390 3 kg vacuumed bag 28 @ 4 3 kg regular bag 58 @ 0.5 141 Using family-owned facilities and farmers own labor, costs not accounted for
260 kg @ 90b 23,400
Notes. a Estimated yield of one actual farm. Yields of organic rice varied widely among different farms and different seasons, and it is difcult to obtain a widely agreed average. b Market prices for organic rice range from NT$80100 per kg. We use the mean for estimation.
Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Processing and packaging Subtotal 2,930 (10.4%) Drying Milling 840 486 Organic fertilizer 2,000 Farm supplies Subcontracted services Tillage and land leveling Transplanting Water monitoring Harvesting Seedlings 600 1,000 800 930 30 pans @ (28 for seedlings 1,100 Rent Subtotal 9,165 (32.6%) Subtotal 3,000 (10.7%) Set price, will be accounted for as opportunity cost when the land is self-owned Market price Retail gross revenue 6,955 Item NGO (Tse-Xin) revenue Certication fees Yield per fen: 560 kg wet graina 85% drying rate 476 kg dry grain 68% milling rate 324 kg milled rice Amount (NT$, percentage in parenthesis) 2,210 Table 4 Price Composition: Organic Rice, NGO-Certied
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Calculation Fees every ve years: a. Organic certication seminar: 600 1 b. Soil and water testing: 3,000 3 c. Annual administrative fee: 2,000 5 d. Certication fee: 2,500 1 (a b c d)/5 years/ 2 crops 2,210 Retail price 3 kg packs 108 @ 260 28,080 Farm gate price 324 kg @ 65 21,125 28,08021,125 6,955
Subtotal 3,500 (12.5%) 3 for transportation) 930 Manure compost 20 packs @ 100, or mixed compost 10 packs @ 200 560 kg wet grain @ 1.5 840 324 kg milled rice @ 1.5 486
34 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Farmers net revenue Retail price Subtotal 1,506 (5.4%) Subtotal 7,979 (28.4%) Total 28,080 (100%) Packaging 180
TABLE 4 continued 3 kg vacuumed bag 36 @ 4 3 kg regular bag 72 @ 0.5 180 Purchase price: 324 kg @ 65 21,060 108 3 kg packs @ 260 28,080 Note. a Estimated yield of one actual farm. Yields of organic rice varied widely among different farms and different seasons, and it is difcult to obtain a widely agreed average.
Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 27 28 Zhong Yongfeng Zhong Xiumei 22 23 24 25 26 Lin Zhen Huang Shude Manager Shih Xiao Ai Guan Lun 21 Li Jun 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 A Cais brother A Ben A Fang A Qin A Xiong Xiao Bai Xiao Tao A Bi A Bis father A Fu A Jie A Qing A Rong Chen Xing A Xiang Du Yu 1 2 3 4 Lao Li A Chun A Xi A Cai regular rice farmer regular rice farmer (female) regular rice farmer good-quality rice farmer, ARES-contracted rice seed producer, farmers association group leader regular rice farmer regular rice farmer good-quality rice farmer (female) good-quality rice farmer good-quality rice farmer organic rice PMCU ofcial organic rice PMCU ofcial organic rice PMCU ofcial regular banana farmer organic rice PMCU ofcial organic rice PMCU ofcial organic rice farmer big tenant farmer for Taiwan Sugar hog farmer hog farmer Anti-Dam Alliance ofcial, former president of the Meinung Peoples Association Anti-Dam Alliance ofcial, former board member of the Meinung Peoples Association local reporter for a national newspaper Standing board member of Homemakers Union and Foundation Number Pseudonym Background Q4 Table 5
35
Appendix 2: List of Interviewees All interviews were conducted between 2005 and 2007; some minor revisions and supplements were made after the initial interviews. Except for those who explicitly asked us to use their real names, we have used pseudonyms. Since members of small communities can be easily identied even when pseudonyms are used, some interviewees requested absolute anonymity. In those cases, we use interviewee A and so on to denote the speaker.
manager of Homemakers Union and Foundation produce department community resident former general secretary of the Meinung Peoples Association, adviser to farmers association president former general secretary of the Meinung Peoples Association former general secretary of the Meinung Peoples Association
36 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 50 51 52 53 54 55 Xiao Wu A Qi Yang Zheng Ke Lan Xu Yan Shen Ying 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 A Mei A Yong A Li Lao Liu A Hua Lao Xie A He A Zheng A Juan A Liang A Ming Xiao Qiang Xiao Zhu Xiao Zhang Lao Lin A Wen A Ming 2 A Xiao A Zheng 2 A Yi A Da former farmers association clerk FA extension worker operator of large grain-drying center service contractor for agricultural machines service contractor for agricultural machines retired ARES ofcial owner of old-style rice mill, guava farmer owner of organic compost plant owner of agrochemical shop (female) owner of agrochemical shop agrochemical vendor former farmers association president
TABLE 5 continued
worker in farmers association supply department worker in farmers association supply department FA board member, son of big tobacco farmer director of farmers association extension department ofcial, Food and Agriculture Bureau, COA township government agricultural department director Provincial farmers association agrochemical plant employee sales, YFY Pulp and Paper organic produce program ofcial in the Kaohsiung County Association for Advancement in Rice Breeding Technology clerk in the COA Bureau of Agricultural Finance extension worker and inspector for the Tse-Xin Foundation CMCU ofcial CMCU ofcial CMCU ofcial CMCU ofcial
Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3
37
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Lee, Teng-Hui (1971). Intersectoral capital ow in the economic development of Taiwan, 1895 1960. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lewontin, Richard C. (2000). The maturing of capitalist agriculture: Farmer as proletarian. In Hungry for 3 Prot, edited by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, 93106. New York: Monthly Review Press. Meinung Peoples Association (MPA) , (n. d.). Social transformation and crisis in mei4 Q1 nung. (http://mpa.ngo.tw/english/socialtrans.html, accessed on 21 June 2010). 5 Mukerji, Chandra (1994). The political mobilization of nature in seventeenth-century French formal gar6 dens. Theory and Society 23: 651 77. Sangren, P. Steven (1987). Orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and the structure of value in Chinese rituals. Modern 7 China 13: 6389. 8 Sturdy, Andrew, David Knights, and Hugh Willmott (1992). Introduction: Skill and consent in the labor process. In Skill and consent: Contemporary studies in the labor process, edited by A. Sturdy et al., 9 1 24. London: Routledge. 10 Tilman, David (1998). The greening of the Green Revolution. Nature 396: 21112. 11 Tu, Chao-Yen (1994). . Taipei: Renjian Chubanshe. Wang, Chia-Huang (2007). Shengji ziben zhuyiMakesi zhuyi guandian de pipan 12 : (Bio-capitalism: A Marxist critique). Keji yiliao yu shehui 4: 1764. 13 Xingzhengyuan nongye weiyuanhui (2008). Minguo jiushiliu nian tongji nianbao 14 (Yearbook of agricultural statistics, 2007). Taipei: Xingzhengyuan nongye weiyuanhui. 15 Xingzhengyuan nongye weiyuanhui (2009). Minguo jiushiqi nian tongji nianbao. 16 (Yearbook of agricultural statistics, 2008). Taipei: Xingzhengyuan nongye weiyuanhui. 17 Yang, Hong-Jen (2001). Kanbujian de jishulianwu biancheng heizhenzhu de jishu fazhanshi 18 : (The invisible technique: The sociotechnical 19 history of cultivating wax apples). Keji yiliao yu shehui 2: 1 52. 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43
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Q1 References Bernstein and Byres (2001), Epstein (2008), Law (2009), Law and Mol (1995) and Lewontin (2000) are provided in the list but not cited in the text. Please supply citation details or delete the reference from the reference list. Please note that the reference citation Ka (2003) has been changed to Ka (1995) with respect to the reference list provided. We have changed superscript c to superscript b in Table 3. Please check and approve. We have named the Appendix 2 Table as Table 5. Please check
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Technological Momentum and The Hegemony of The Green Revolution: A Case Study of An Organic Rice Cooperative in Taiwan

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East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (2011) 5:139 DOI 10.1215/18752160-1276808 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 K.-M.

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Farm supplies 25.5%

Farm supplies 16%

Subcontracted services 19%

Fig. 1 Composition of rice wholesale price: conventional production. See Appendix 1

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Fig. 3 Seedlings ready for mechanical transplanting. Photograph by Kuei-Mei Lo

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Organic rice, direct sale Rent 13%

Farmer's revenue 55%

Subcontracted services 15%

Fig. 5 Composition of rice wholesale price: organic. See Appendix 1

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Subtotal 3,500 (29.8%)

Subtotal 3,000 (25.5%)

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Subtotal 3442.5 (18.4%)

Subtotal 3,500 (18.7%)

Subtotal 3,000 (16.0%)

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

260 kg @ 90b 23,400

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3

K.-M. Lo and H.-H. Chen

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

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