Mountain agriculture at fault?
A meeting of officials and scholars convened by the premier found three main causes for the stagnation of the reservoir water: poor reforestation work, mountain agriculture, and mountain road-building. Although some scholars disagreed-arguing instead that the unusually large amount of rain and the natural steepness of surrounding slopes had caused even primeval forest to collapse-the debate again drew attention to excessive land use in the mountains, especially for orchards, which have expanded rapidly in recent years. Everywhere people wondered if it was worth losing a reservoir just so we can have peaches from Mt. Lala.
As a result of these calamities, the Executive Yuan has reevaluated land-use policy, and come up with a conservative-leaning policy that is quite different from past responses of simple disaster relief and rehabilitation. Chang Jing-sen, vice-chairman of the CEPD, which is in charge of land-use policy, states that the period of continuous high growth in Taiwan is over; moreover the environment has taken all the punishment it can, and the land is sick. What is needed is recovery. Conservation should be the main function of medium- and high-altitude areas. In those areas that do not need rehabilitation, the government should just bite the bullet and abandon the roads, and people who live in mountain areas should be offered incentives for moving out.
In an era of strong environmental consciousness, when reports of disasters are frequent, naturally a land-use policy that gives the environment central importance is going to get a generally positive response. But because the government actually promoted mountain agriculture for half a century, now hundreds of thousands of farmers and workers in related industries depend on it for their livelihood, and there is also the question of the cultural and historic needs of Aborigines who call the mountain forests home. How can the gains and losses of "bringing agriculture down to earth" be apportioned? Is there no way to better manage mountain agriculture?
Perhaps we can get some clues to the answers to these questions by scanning over the history of mountain agriculture. The story begins with the construction of the Central Cross-Island Highway (CCIH) and the creation of farms run by the Veterans Affairs Commission.
VUps and downs... and ups
Back in the 1950s, in order to create transportation links across the Central Mountain Range to connect eastern and western Taiwan, the government began to carve the CCIH out of the mountains. In the early stages, it was very difficult to transport materials to the project; supply of vegetables was especially problematic. So the government called on retired veterans to begin growing crops in the mountains, both to supply the road construction project and also to help develop new food sources for then food-short Taiwan. In 1957, the first highland agriculture project-Fushou Mountain Farm-was established near Lishan. Later, more projects of the same variety were launched along the route followed by the CCIH.
"Back in the 1960s and 1970s, increasing food production was an important target of economic planning," says former Council of Agriculture chairman Peng Tso-kwei. Developing mountain and marine food sources and developing marginal land were central to achieving this objective. The government even established a special Bureau of Mountain Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, as well as another agency to develop land reclaimed from the sea.
In the early days of the "agriculture into the mountains" policy, there was no sign of temperate-zone fruit. However, when some workers at Fushou Mountain Farm saw that pear trees planted around the former Japanese police station in a nearby Aboriginal community at Huanshan grew well, they decided to import apple, pear, and peach trees from Japan for trial planting. With help from experts at National Chung Hsing University's department of horticulture and plant pathology, after many setbacks they finally met with success. They subsequently began supplying saplings to local Aborigines, and the area under orchard cultivation steadily spread beyond the area covered by the original farm.
As one fruit farmer who is familiar with development in Lishan relates, because temperate fruits commanded high prices and yielded higher profit margins, the Aboriginal reservation land nearby was quickly exploited for orchards, and in a short time the mountain forests were transformed into fruit orchards to the fullest extent possible.
The successful planting of temperate-zone fruits in a sub-tropical country was a triumph for Taiwanese agriculture. But times have changed, and scenes like this may soon disappear. The photo shows a fruit seller at Wuling-the highest-altitude point on any main road in Taiwan-on the highway to Lishan.