Taiwan: Hualien is a mecca for organic food

As the largest and the least populated county in Taiwan, Hualien is known for its natural beauty, which has largely been spared the scars of industrialization because of its remote location on the eastern side of the Central Mountain Range.
Not surprisingly, much of the county's economic activity has to do with farming, with one quarter of the population employed in agriculture, making the most of the area's relatively unpolluted water and soil. Unlike other farming counties, the adverse effects of chemical fertilizers and pesticides have not yet made themselves felt, and some Hualien farmers are reaping the rewards of their recent foray into organic farming.

The county had been feeling the heat from rising imports of produce from abroad, including rice from Australia and fruits from Japan and Korea, so in 2004, County Magistrate Hsieh Shen-san launched the Innocuous Agriculture Development in Hualien program. The purpose, said Hsieh, was to "pass the good land on to our children for future generations, increase the per capita income of local farmers and provide a new direction for them by combining agricultural activities with the leisure industry, thus generating even greater revenue."

The initial response from the farming community was less than favorable: Farmers were unfamiliar with methods of organic farming and reticent about giving up old techniques, including the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. The director of the county's Agriculture Bureau and one of the driving forces behind IADH implementation, Du Li-hwa, recruited 30 demonstration farmers from around the county to try out the organic farming techniques for the first year. In the meantime, Du also realized the importance of coming up with a way to effectively market the produce.

Farmers in Hualien lacked the funding and skills required to establish brand images and reach out to the public in sophisticated marketing campaigns. Du therefore began cooperating with four major farmers associations to set up logistics centers in Hualien City and the towns of Shoufong, Guangfu, Fongbin and Fuli. With these centers certifying IADH produce, the Agriculture Bureau took on the responsibility of operating publicity campaigns to promote its sale around the island.

Together, the Agriculture Bureau and farmers associations managed to forge a national sales and distribution network. By the end of 2005, the number of demonstration farms participating in the IADH program rose from 30 to 164, and this year, Du expects that number to reach 200.

Like many technical terms, "innocuous agriculture" may sound odd to the uninitiated. It was coined by the government of Hualien County to describe its unique form of organic farming, since existing terms such as organic farming, biological farming and ecological farming each have their own established definitions and connotations. In addition to encompassing farming, fishery and livestock, the term includes the operation of leisure farms. Visitors to such leisure farms are offered food, lodging and tours, benefiting not only local farmers but other nearby businesses and bringing in the much-needed tourist dollar.

Chen Wei-liang runs a two-hectare lotus farm located roughly 80 kilometers south of Hualien City, in the town of Shoufong. Next to his farm, Chen built a 10-room bed and breakfast and a restaurant he dubbed Fu-li Fishing Village, which caters to visitors from the big city eager to spend a few days in the rural countryside of eastern Taiwan.

"Can you imagine that those silly Taipei people pay me $50 just to stay overnight in my B&B and watch the frogs in my field?" Chen laughed. Never one to rest on his laurels, his current business undertaking is to market his own brand of organic lotus tea, which he claims makes people healthier.

Chen's success story is not an anomaly. Lee Ja-fong, who grows organic vegetables in Shoufong, was the very first farmer selected by the Agriculture Bureau through a series of strict tests on the soil and water in his 2.5 hectares of land. He has spent more than $200,000 on equipment and greenhouses that help keep bugs and worms away from his precious crops. Although these measures are effective against most species, they were not enough to deter Taiwan's plentiful and tenacious cutworms.

"My family and I spent many summer nights working with shovels until midnight to rid our plants of those worms, since they only come out at night," Lee recalled. "It was not at all rosy in the beginning. Worse, the two typhoons that hit last year blew away my greenhouses, and it cost me a great deal to rebuild." Despite these difficulties, rebuild he did, and his tenacity eventually paid off. His operation is back at full capacity, and demand is high. "Nowadays, I can't produce enough to meet the demand from the Shoufong Farmers' Association," Lee beamed.

Convincing farmers to try the new approaches was not an easy task, but Wun Siu-chun's success with them has helped others to appreciate their value. Wun is a rice farmer who started raising ducks in his rice field in lieu of using chemical fertilizers or pesticides. His ducks eat the weeds, snails and worms, and their excrement becomes a natural fertilizer.

The procedure employed by Wun is called the aigamo method. It was first developed in 1989 by a farmer in the Fukuoka Prefecture of Japan named Takao Furuno. Wun has found that using the aigamo method in conjunction with the application of an organic fertilizer purchased from his local farmers association pays off handsomely.

"Now, except for a few villagers who refuse to join us, almost every household in Lousan is participating," he pointed out. Last year, Fuli Rice passed 127 strict tests required by the Japanese government and is now being exported to Japan for the first time since the 1940s.

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