technological momentum and the hegemony of the green revolution: a case study of an organic rice...

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Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the GreenRevolution: A Case Study of an Organic Rice Cooperative in

Taiwan

Kuei-Mei Lo and Hsin-Hsing Chen

Received: 13 July 2010 / Accepted: 8 February 2011

qNational Science Council, Taiwan 2011

Abstract Increasing productivity through high-yield, high-response, chemical-

dependent food crop cultivars to stabilize rural societythat was the Cold Warera

social-technical strategy commonly known as the Green Revolution. A similar strat-

egy 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 coop-erative 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 confines 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 sys-

tem 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

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (2011) 5:139

DOI 10.1215/18752160-1276808

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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 werefilled 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 antiglob-

alization 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 mo-

nopoly on farm inputs and outputs, the hazards presented by chemical-dependentagriculture, and so on. Biotechnology, the proposed panacea for agricultural prob-

lems, is often viewed with suspicion, as major players in this field 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 common-

place 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 agri-

cultural 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 coopera-

tive at its inception in 2005 was to make organic rice production economically feasi-

ble. A series of setbacks led to its demise in 2009. The unexpectedly strong obstaclesencountered 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 influential rural sociologist and

critic of agricultural biotechnology, Wang (2007) critically examined the global

monopoly on biotechnology held by a few transnational corporations and warnedof the threat this presented to farmers. Yang (2001) endowed farmers with much

more agency and innovative capacity embedded in local community, while acknowl-

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

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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 verydifferent 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, pro-

duction, and distribution. The hegemonic social-technical order reproduced by agro-bureaucratic institutions, what we think of as their technological momentum, remains

formidable. Central to that momentum is materiality, specifically the material charac-

teristics 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 large-

scale monoculture of laboratory-bred high-yield, high-response food crops. Accom-

panying the planting of such varieties, a comprehensive technological system delivers

synthetic fertilizers, agrochemicals, irrigation, machinery, and other inputs to the

field; otherwise the plants will not grow as expected. Such requirements are built in.

They enter the system at the first 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 Inter-

national 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 Com-

mission 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 social-

cultural 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

1 Commenting on therecord high food harvest in Pakistan,India, Turkey, andthe Philippines, Gaud (1968)

said: These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution.

Technological Momentum and the Hegemony of the Green Revolution 3

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Rockefeller Foundation, USAID, and other promoters of these cultivars envisioned

them as a technological fix for the Communist Problem in the rural Third World,

the answer to the Red agrarian revolution. Political outcomes of the Green Revolu-

tion strategy varied from place to place: utter failure in wartime South Vietnam, butsuccess 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 con-

cerned 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 modi-fied 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 world-

wide antiglobalization movement since the 1990s. They often argue that the high

capital investments that the Green Revolutionstyle 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 hap-

pened 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 tech-

niques they associated with immiseration could produce more desirable social out-

comes 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 financial 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. Chronicsocial-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 hasbeen published bimonthly since 2003. Its contributors and subscribers include both organic farmers and

consumers.


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overlooked. An established technological system, such as Green Revolutionstyle

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. There-

fore, 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 significant 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 findings 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 fifty-five rice farmers and persons in related industries and institutions from April

to December 2005. (See appendix 2 for the list of interviewees.)

Preliminary findings of a comparison between the interviews and archival data

were presented for discussion and revision in a series of meetings with fifteen 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 Associationfrom 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 coop-

erative 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 PMCUsvaries greatly. Although administratively subordinate to the Farmers Association, a PMCU is an indepen-

dent economic unit with its own elected officials and is legally responsible for its own operation.


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During this period of participatory research, most data were recorded as field notes.

In-depth interviews were recorded and transcribed, but frequent and continuous dis-

cussions 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 difficult it was to get the project

going. Challenges ranged from seed characteristics, machine specifications, neighbor-

hood 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 rice-

based 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 tech-

nological 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 financier 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, organi-

zational norms, and political considerations arose, soon exceeding the control of any

individual.

Hughes defined a technological system as including both physical hardware and

softwarethe technical componentsand the associated social components; com-bined, 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 techno-

logical system, according to him, goes through four phases from its inception to

maturity. In the first phase, the invention and development of a specific system are

considered amongst an array of possibilities. In the second phase, technology is trans-

ferred 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-

4 Direct quotations from our field notes and recorded interviews are indicated with our original lettered

coding such as Interviewee B, rVacca or Lao Xie field-Saicb.


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ment. After such reverse salients have been defined and eliminated, a system enters

the fourth phase characterized by technological momentum: A system with substan-

tial momentum has mass, velocity, and direction (Hughes 1983: 14) After the system

matures and gains momentum, change of direction is unlikely without a significanthistorical 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 organiz-

ational 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 sys-

tems is a concept that can be located somewhere between the poles of technicaldeterminism and social constructivism. The social constructivists have a key to under-

standing 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 Revolutionstyle 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 first 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 social-

cultural transformation, not simply a technological endeavor. Correspondingly, anal-

ysis 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 first fully developed in the Marxist tradition

by Antonio Gramsci (1971) to describe the bourgeois leadership of democratic revo-

lutions. Subsequent social theorists have found hegemony an especially useful idea for

analyzing diverse and relatively stable class societies such as Western liberal democ-

racy (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Bocock 1986). Anthropologists of Chinese cultureoften use the concept of hegemony to analyze the complex and contradictory charac-

teristics of folk ritual system. (e.g., Sangren 1987). Since Michael Burawoys influ-

ential 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 ideologi-

cal) 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 differ-entiate 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 agricultureis 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 atti-

tudes remain subtle, piecemeal, and taken for granted. In other words, this is a hege-

monic 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 field 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 flood plains at the convergence of two rivers in

1736. According to official 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 field-

work 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

fieldwork 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 ofpastoral inspiration for the Nativist vernacular literature since the 1970s.

6Still, Bain

(1993) remains the only systematic social study of agriculture in Meinung to date.

5 Although all official 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 ricecultivation possesses in Taiwan. Registrationof farmlandownership started in the Dutch era

from 1624 to 1662. So central to local society did the system imposed by Dutch imperialists in the seven-

teenth 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 first planting season of 2005, for

instance, 2,609 out of the towns 5,222 farming households planted rice, accountingfor 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 long-

grained 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 theearly twentieth century to adapt japonica varieties to the local environment. The first

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 significant 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 farm-

ers: 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-rice-

tobacco: two crops of rice grown between February and October, followed by a wintercrop of tobacco. Until the 1990s, tobacco was a relatively profitable cash crop with

guaranteed purchase contract with the state-owned Taiwan Tobacco and Alcohol

Monopoly Bureau.8

Other rural townships with less profitable winter crops lost

their young people to the cities earlier than Meinung.

inequality.The prominentdebate on literaturebetween theNativists andthe Modernists from 1977to 1978is

now widely regarded as an essential component of contemporary political consciousness in Taiwan.7 See Tu (1994) and Ka (1995) for analysis of riziculture under Japanese colonialism.Q2

8 The 1987 US-Taiwan trade agreement abolished the state tobacco monopoly and allowed import of UStobacco products. The Monopoly Bureau later became a state-owned company. Its contract farming

decreased steadily for two decades and was finally abolished in 2008.


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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 first settlement. This was initially a measure to

safeguard the settlers from aboriginal raids, but the spatial arrangement was codifiedby 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 top-

down land reform. And, in tandem with the creation of a smallholders society in the

countryside, the JCRR created a comprehensive web of agricultural social-techno-

logical institutions on the foundation of Japanese colonial agrobureaucracy and agri-

business, 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. Osten-

sibly 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 posi-

tions. A farmers association always has at least three departments: credit, supply andmarketing, 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

divertagriculturalwaterto urban or industrial use, forcing farmers to lettheir landslie fallow. This hasbeen a

source of constant social conflict in rural Taiwan. The anti-dam campaign in Meinung is but one example.10 Researchers on economic developmentin Taiwan in the1950s and 1960s often point out that the unequal

terms of trade between the state-monopolized syntheticfertilizer and the farmers rice were among the mostimportant 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 official 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 theextension departments of local farming associations: agronomics education for

men, home economics classes for women, and the 4 H Club for youths.11

The ex-

pressed goal of the program was to transform family farms into market-oriented,

scientifically educated, and technologically sophisticated economic entities, thereby

modernizing rural society. The programs profound influence can still be felt: the

first generation of 4H clubbers now fills the ranks of community elders, and many

modern ways of life promoted by the JCRR, such as chemical-dependent agricul-

ture, are now the conventions in rural culture. Besides fostering agrobureaucratic

institutions such as the farmers association, JCRR programs also encouraged estab-

lishment of commercialized production and distribution of farm supplies, as well ascommercialized 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 fields 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 first 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 first crop of

the year. Organic rice usually yields half that amount, at a much higher cost per unit.

Despite significant 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 surplusinto 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 twentiethcentury. In Taiwan, it is administered by the farmers associations. The fourHs 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 first 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, andtriggered the first wave of farmers protests in the late 1980s. Subsequent trade liberal-

ization 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 first 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 hect-ares, 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 approxi-

mately 1,000 hectares in recent years (Xingzhengyuan nongye weiyuanhui 2009).

On the other hand, local farmers associations and individual farmers are encour-

aged 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 (), emphasiz-

ing 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 pro-

cesses 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 high-

quality program, does not necessarily result in decreasedunit 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 thegovernments 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.


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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 aban-

doned. 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

Regular rice (Gov't procurement)

Farmer's net

revenue 4.5%

Farm supplies

25.5%

Subcontracted

services 29.8%

Rent 25.5%

FA revenue 14.7%

High quality rice (farmers' Assn. marketed)

Farmer's net

revenue 31%

Farm supplies

16%

Rent 16%

Subcontracted

services

19%

FA revenue 18%

Fig. 1 Composition of rice wholesale price: conventional production. SeeAppendix 1


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very much like running an enterprise in Taiwans famed flexible-specialized industrial

sector.15

Farmers interviewed typically broke down the constituents of their rices whole-

sale 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 profitability, 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 profitable, in spite of much higher associ-

ated costs and lower yields. Without trial, no one can be sure whether the potential

benefit can be realized into a sensible operation.

15 See Ka (1993) for discussion on the flexible specialization of Taiwans industrial sector and its linkages

with the peasant culture.

Fig. 2 Packaged rice sold by the Chishang Farmers Association, one of the most successful boutique rice

brand names. Photograph by Hsin-Hsing Chen


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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 Sep-tember 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 even-

tually convinced the cooperatives members to give up. From the very tangible mate-

riality 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 foundedduring 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 govern-

ment. Its curricula include practical skill training, academic subjects, and organizing

of community civic groups. These schools were meant to offer a highly nonhierarchi-

cal 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 bothMeinung and Chishan, a neighboring township. At its inception, the leading organiz-

ers 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 5.5jia (5.33 ha)

to work with and could only be considered a preliminary effort. Indeed, from pro-duction 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 affiliated with the local farmers

association, was officially founded in September 2005. The twelve founding memberswere farmers aged between forty and fifty.

From the outset the group encountered difficultiesa host of internal disagree-

ments and external pressures. Collectivizing production, although a founding prin-

ciple, 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 field into paddy consumedmuch 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 flow problem. But building the required net rooms cost yet another

enormous sum even with a government subsidy. In late 2009, serious cash flow imbal-

ance 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, mate-

riality reproduces existing relations. Seeds, fertilizer, and machinesthese intercon-

nected material elements regulate how rice is produced in Meinung. The machinerys

specifications confine organic farmers to a very narrow range of options in virtually

every aspect of production: rice strain, equipment, plant nutrient, and so on. Further-

more, 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 conventionsin 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 refined 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 hasbecome 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 keen-

ness to experiment, likely a legacy of the 4H Club, combined with the collegial

atmosphere of the village social life, fostered intensive knowledge sharing and has-

tened agricultural innovation. This is not likely to happen with rice. Virtually all ricevarieties 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 Revo-

lution 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 firmly 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 first 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 pro-

duction, and the seed they produce is sent through the farmers association to com-

mercial 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 field-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 commer-

cial nurseries), they could not find 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 field planted is to buy seedlings

from commercial nurseries. None of the farming households today have sufficient

labor power to do the planting the old way. It is also financially 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 comein 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 govern-

ment. Subcontracting mechanized planting services, therefore, entails a series of

actions eventually connecting the farm to the chain of agrobureaucracy of the state-rice regime. Under such circumstances, if a farmer was to grow his or her own seed-


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lings, this could upset the operators of the local transplanting team and their businessassociates, 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, am-

monium 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 field-Rabac)

In comparison with industrial production, the cost of homemade compost appearsuneconomical for individual farmers. A shortage of household labor simply rules it

out. There are many certified commercial brands of organic fertilizers made by large-

Fig. 3 Seedlings ready for mechanical transplanting. 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 harvest-

ing 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

fields using combines, and suitable plants have become essential. Every harvest sea-

son, 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 certification 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 difficult 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 prob-

lem: using equipment at the research and extension station, buying their own small-scale 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.

Fig. 4 Mechanical transplanting in Meinung. Photograph by Kuei-Mei Lo


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Members of the cooperative estimated that they spend at least three hundred per-

son-hours of combined labor just to dry one harvest (Xiao Bai, field-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 queuefor this. Upon its formation, the cooperative decided to buy one small, secondhand

milling machine with its fund, and the four elected officials of the cooperative took

turns to operate the machine for the whole collective. The unexpectedly in efficiency

of the machine and long hours of drudgery later resulted in protests from the officials.

So the leader of the cooperative decided to subcontract the milling to an owner-

operator of drying machine who also has a medium-size milling machine. His ma-

chine, 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 finished product; members of the

cooperative did not like its appearance (Xiao Tao field-Vaccb).

In every step from plowing the paddy to milling the harvest, years of mechanizationand specialization have constructed a set of rigid specifications 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

configuration of social power.

9 Marketing and Certification

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 certification

system that can generate consumer trust. Marketing is always burdening farmers with

advanced agricultural technology and thus the problem of overproduction. Difficulty

in distribution is one of the most important problems that propelled members of the

Meinung organic rice cooperative to decide to collectivize in the first place. In spite of

consumer enthusiasm for organic produce, the existing distribution channels in Tai-

wan are far from adequate for both producers and consumers. In recent years, some

NGOs have acquired sufficient public credibility for them to inspect, monitor, andcertify produce as organic. However, the certification 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 profiteering 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 thesemeans, 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 five jia of cultivation area areneeded 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 field-Vacbf).

One alternative to direct sale, in which consumer trust is based on personal con-

tacts, is organic certification. Befitting the trend of liberalization, the Council of

Agriculture does not operate organic certification itself. Instead, the 2007 Farm Pro-

duce Production and Certification Act requires that the ministry set regulations and

accredit private organizations, both for-profit and nonprofit, to issue organic certifica-tions. So far, twelve entities have been certified: two universities, three biotechnology

companies, and six civic organizations. Among them, by far the biggest is the Tse-Xin

Organic Agriculture Foundation, whose certified 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 certification process,

hoping to have his rice marketed commercially. He found the cost of certification 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

five 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 certification organizations such as Tse-Xin, there are

other civic organizations in Taiwan that are not officially accredited but still highly

trusted for their own certification process. The biggest among them is the Homemak-

ers 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

office and branches in all major cities. The Homemakers Union and Foundation is

reputedly more concerned with farmers economic sustainability than other organi-zations; monthly members magazines always features reports on farmers and agri-

cultural 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 official certification process but generated from personal contacts. But the size of

its operation is still quite small. In 2006 HUF certified 30 hectares of rice paddy as

organic, a fraction of the 260 hectares certified that year (Manager Shih speech-

20070731). Meinungs organic rice cooperative was not certified by the Home-

makers Union and Foundation.

The uncertainty in marketing is inhibiting farmers from taking up organic agricul-ture. By comparison, conventional rice cultivation, unprofitable as it is, is much less

laborious for the farmers. Sometimes a private rice mill cooperates with the harvest


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team to purchase a farmers total harvest beforehand. A representative of the mill will

come to the field to estimate the quality and quantity of the yield, and make a lump-

sum 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. Market-

ing 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 beforeit ceased to operate.

Organic rice, direct sale

Farmer's

revenue 55%

Processing and

packaging 5%

Subcontracted

services 15%

Rent 13%

Farm supplies

12.%

Organic rice, NGO certified

Farmer's revenue

28%

Processing and

packaging

5%Rent 11%

Subcontracted

services13%

Farm supplies

10%

NGO revenue

33%

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


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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 7Elevenconvenience store chain; and the YFY Paper Group (), the biggest

paper and pulp maker in Taiwan. They do not have the problem in marketing and

certification, as they can afford the publicity campaign needed to establish the nec-

essary 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 issocial 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 profitable for small

farmers, many still hold firm convictions about how farming is supposed to be

done, convictions that were formed and repeatedly reaffirmed 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 farm-

ing but disagree with the collective approach. Just as labor process theorists observed

on various industrial shop floors in their case studies, a strong atmosphere of compe-

tition exists among Meinung farmers. This is a culture the JCRR programs sought to

foster, and it amplifies all of the criticisms aimed at organic farming. This is not merely

a product of interpersonal conflicts, 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 profitable? 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 impliedin 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? Andonce the crop shows signs of trouble, rumors quickly fly 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 profits are all

eaten up by labor costs. You recover your investment little by little when some-

one 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 field. 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

gathering

technological momentum and the hegemony of the green revolution: a case study of an organic rice...

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