tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10698887.post8616083193364380205..comments2023-10-22T18:25:39.688+08:00Comments on The View from Taiwan: Taiwan and Food SecurityMichael Turtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17974403961870976346noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10698887.post-72426308068518249602010-11-18T16:47:41.492+08:002010-11-18T16:47:41.492+08:00Hey I topic I pay a lot of attention to, shame it ...Hey I topic I pay a lot of attention to, shame it got bumped to the bottom by all that much less interesting stuff.<br /><br />Taiwan and pretty much the rest of the world has a serious food problem coming up and it's basically going to effect everyone everywhere in really bad ways.<br /><br />-Farming worldwide is a heavily subsidized occupation with sometimes gross inefficiencies. Subsidized industries tend to do a lot worse business wise than unsubsidized businesses. This also leads to govts also setting food prices further worsening the situation.<br />-Farming is time, labor, capital and mentally intensive. People who go into farming either tend to be people who were born into farming or people who romanticize it. You saw this with the organic farm boom and bust in the US. <br />-Farming to be profitable either has to rely on cheap, often imported, labor or mechanization. <br /><br />So why should your average Taiwanese person go into farming, when the distribution is govt controlled, land is expensive and you have very little access to cheap labor and the smallness impeding mechanization? Then you have the situation where a place like Hualian for large scale cereal production basically has no transport links to move the cereals for further processing and distribution. <br /><br />I'd also add that you fail to mention the bio-fuels mandate. I believe the Euros just set a new mandate that will require the space equivalent to Belgium be used to grow the crops for bio-fuels. <br /><br />That's all before you get into the capital intensive part of it. I'd think that if you looked at it from a ROI perspective that you'd find that farming was a loser return wise compared to relatively safer investments. <br /><br />Oddly I didn't see anything for mushroom farming. This actually has a great ROI and low capital costs and excels in Taiwan despite it being monopolized.Okaminoreply@blogger.com