Farmers, Protest Against Globalization

Taipei Times, Feb. 4, 2013

Due to the opening the market or the Free Market, especially on agricultural products, farmers are threaten in their livelihood. Not only the pressure of the U.S. but there are a lot of products are ready to export the agricultural products from China. In return, Taiwan wants to export the industrial products to China.

This is not only situation of Taiwan but it is also the problem of Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, and the country that I am from, South Korea.

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“We gather here today to express our anger, we want to tell the government that we’re fed up with their compromises on our food sovereignty, it’s a serious problem that our food self-sufficiency has dropped to 33 percent now,” Taiwan Rural Front (TRF) spokeswoman Tsai Pei-hui (蔡培慧) told the crowd at the rally. “You’ve put our dining tables and refrigerators in other people’s homes, we want to keep them in our own places.”

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Market or the government easily neglect on the agricultural products since they are cheap and make less money than to produce industrial products. So they think more money is left if they import agricultural products from other countries and to export the industrial products that produce on the land that should be the farm or rice field. This leads to the situation of really low rate of food self-sufficiency. This seems okay since we can import rice, potatoes, corns, and such. However, low rate of food sufficiency is not the matter of we can easily ignore. 

There was a revolution in Iraq last year. The fundamental reason for this revolution was lack of food. Iraq was the country that imports about 50 percent of wheat that they consume from Russia. However, Russia was not able to export the sufficient wheat to other countries due to the weather change that does not suitable to have abundant crop. Since the Iraq was with less than 30 percent of food self-sufficiency, especially with the wheat which is main food consumed in the Iraq, faced a lot of people cannot have their meal though they have money to buy. Supply of the wheat is lacking while there were many people demanding for wheat raised the cost of wheat twice and three times expensive than its original price. In the end, this leads to the revolution in Iraq that having poor running government.

As I am also the citizen of a country where there is low rate of food-sufficiency, I do concern the situation of no food to consume. Globalization and Free Market on agriculture, there should be more consideration on this matter and study the case of other countries which already having longer experiences in this field. Earning money is to spend them for basic things and to enjoy our life with extra money that left. Making more industrial products than agricultural products may be makes more money but more money to make is unnecessary if there is lack of things to consume and price goes higher.