This summer, while media attention was focused on the devastation wrought by Typhoon Herb in Nantou County and the Mt. Ali area, in Taoyuan County's Fuhsing Rural Township several houses which had stood half way up the mountainside were also washed down into the river. In the river bed, which the county government had leased out for trout farming, it was as if a huge Buddhist animal release ceremony had been held, for the fish tanks had been washed away by the flood along with their trout. The fish farm owner was swept away too, along with NT$1 million she had planned to spend on trout fry, and has never been found. At a rough estimate, three villages in Fuhsing Rural Township suffered damage worth NT$400 million. "In some places the damage was certainly no less severe than in Hsinyi Rural Township in Nantou County," says an employee in Fu-hsing Rural Township Council's civil affairs department.
Temperate fruit in tropical Taiwan
According to figures from the Council of Agriculture, 10% of Taiwan's mountain slope lands have been illegally cleared for farming. But of Fuhsing Rural Township's more than 2000 hectares of slope land, illegal clearance extends to as much as one fifth: over 400 hectares.
Professor Chang Shih-chiao of NTU's geography department describes the agriculture carried out in Taiwan's high mountain areas as "an exercise in defying the limits of gravity." In line with the limitations of people's physical strength, those crops which require the least care are planted on the steepest slopes. For instance, tea bushes have to be planted on terraces for continuous irrigation, and they require a lot of attention, so they are usually planted on gentler slopes.
Fruit orchards need rather less care and so are planted on rather steeper slopes. This is why soil erosion is less severe upstream of the Feitsui Reservoir, where there are many tea gardens, than above the Shihmen Reservoir. As for areca (betel nut) palms, which need still less care, they are planted on even more precipitous slopes.
It has been said that it is fortunate the climate upstream of the Shihmen Reservoir is damp and cool, so that areca palms do not bring in much profit. But temperate-zone fruit trees seem to be in paradise there, for they are to be found scattered all over Shihmen's catchment area.
Large-scale planting of temperate-zone fruits in Taiwan's high mountains began at Lishan on the Central Cross-Island Highway, and the Techi Reservoir became a collecting trough for fertilizers and pesticides, its water fetid all year and often changing color. It not only became a headache for water conservancy engineers in Taiwan, but internationally it also became one of the most widely cited examples of a polluted reservoir. Although the government has relaxed import restrictions on apples to try to depress the market for Lishan fruit, and despite many attempts to prevent the further expansion of Lishan's orchards and vegetable gardens, the "Lishan model" has been widely applied and continues to spread far and wide. Several years ago it reached Fuhsing Rural Township to the north.
Along the Northern Cross-Island Highway, the air turns cold early in the year, and this brings forward the harvest season of New Century pears, California plums, California honey plums, honey peaches and even kiwi-fruit. Thanks to the abundant sunshine, the quality of the fruit far surpasses that of other areas, and with Taiwan's largest consumer market, Greater Taipei, close at hand, sales from the area have gradually taken off and overtaken Lishan.
Of all these types of fruit, the honey peach is particularly blessed. Honey peaches grow best in Taiwan at elevations from 800 to 1200 meters. Lishan's orchards are at 2000 meters and above, and although honey peaches grow large and beautiful there, their sweetness is not quite up to scratch. But the honey peaches grown at around 1100 meters in the Upper Paling area of Fuhsing Rural Township are sweet and juicy, and a match for any from temperate-zone countries. Furthermore, allowing imports is no discouragement at all to local honey peach growers, because the fruits bruise very easily in transit. The combination of honey peaches and the scenery of Mt. Lala have made the area into a well-known tourist attraction.
In 1987, the Taoyuan County Government began putting on a "Honey Peach Night" activity every summer, and with top politicians from many cities around the island attending, and Taoyuan County chief executive Liu Pang-you selling the concept for all he was worth, honey peaches became Taoyuan County's "national fruit." Taoyuan got its name, which means Peach Garden, from the peach trees which grew in its countryside. Today, thanks to the mountain honey peaches, it again lives up to its name.
The land of the honey peach
Driving up the Northern Cross-Island Highway to the Upper Paling area, in early spring one sees a mass of fruit trees in blossom. These trees have earned the area the name "the Lishan of the North," and pick-your-own orchards provide tourists with an attractive destination. One Taipei City taxi driver recounts how, when the honey peach season arrives, he sets off early in the mornings in a nine-seater minibus to take tourists up the mountain. They bring back box after box of honey peaches with them, and have a good time and a good meal. The minibus hire charge is less than NT$10,000, and everyone comes back saying how much they have enjoyed themselves; he too earns more than he would in a day spent driving around in Taipei City.
However, in the narrow confines of Taiwan's northwestern corner, the Northern Cross-Island Highway does not offer the same broad expanses of land as Lishan on the Central Cross-Island Highway, so the orchards are packed more closely together and planted on steeper slopes. Although soil conservation experts say that clearing land on slopes steeper than 28_ is likely to lead to soil erosion, along the Northern Cross-Island Highway "they even clear 80_ slopes." A Shihmen Reservoir employee who often goes up the mountains to do soil conservation work says that the pipes which farmers run from mountain springs to irrigate the orchards are left to flow continuously, and with time this creates erosion channels down which the soil is washed away.
In the eyes of the Taoyuan County Government and Fuhsing Rural Township Council, for Fuhsing to develop tourism and agriculture is something perfectly natural, particularly as reserved aboriginal land accounts for 22% of Fuhsing Rural Township's area. In the past the local aboriginals lived by growing bamboo and planting trees, but the bamboo can only be harvested once every three to five years, and the subsidy of NT$150,000 per hectare which the government pays to encourage afforestation "is not for one year, but for until the trees are grown," as Mr. Chiang, an agricultural technician with Fuhsing Rural Township Council stresses. The income from honey peaches is much greater-a honey peach tree yields a harvest of at least 60 kilograms a year, and a Taiwanese pound (600 grams) sells for an average NT$150, so after deducting costs, one tree can bring in an annual profit of over NT$10,000. Furthermore, tourist visitors scramble to buy honey peaches-"as if the farmers were giving them away," says Mr. Chiang, not forgetting to take a dig at city folk.
Today, orchard operators no longer live from hand to mouth, but have become high income earners. "Wage levels in Fuhsing Rural Township are now the highest anywhere in Taiwan's mountain areas," says the owner of Upper Paling's Tienshan Farm, which is famous for its flowers.
Signed and sealed by three generations
Growing temperate fruits is good for the wealth, and as in Taiwan's other mountain areas, this has attracted more and more people from the plains to bring their money up the mountains and lease reserved land or develop farms jointly with aboriginals. In Fuhsing Rural Township, the regulations that reserved land cannot be rented to people from the plains, and that it cannot be bought and sold freely between aboriginals, are now honored more in the breach than in the observance.
To get the use of mountain land, people from the plains sign illegal permanent leases with aboriginals, and even demand that the lessor's children and grandchildren append their stamps to show their agreement. An official at the Ministry of the Interior's Land Use Administration says quite openly that the ban on plains dwellers leasing reserved land is flouted as habitually as the rule barring large companies from buying farmland. Just as the farmland has all been snapped up by conglomerates, plains dwellers who sign secret contracts with aboriginals run little risk of being caught, and "much reserved land is being used by plains dwellers." Business people who run restaurants and hotels in the cities have opened holiday villas and kiwi farms on the steep slopes of Mt. Lala as if opening chain stores.
At present the Ministry of the Interior is pressing ahead with the drafting of new regulations to govern aboriginal reserved land, in order to address the problem of the chaotic leasing of such land. But demands from plains-dwelling lessees that restrictions on land rights in reserved land should be lifted have become the main obstacle to the regulations becoming law, and the amount of mountain slope land being illegally cleared and illegally built on has continued to spread out of control.
A broad highway
For the peaches to be transported at harvest time, and for tourists to come up the mountains, both require good transport links. Hence today Fuhsing Rural Township, Tao-yuan County's only mountain region, has ever more, ever longer roads, in an ever denser network.
After Typhoon Herb, Executive Yuan Premier Lien Chan, out of solicitude for the public's plight, directed the Council for Agriculture to repair the Northern Cross-Island Highway as quickly as possible so that mountain fruit and vegetables could be transported down to the plains to fill the gap in the supply to markets there. But a month later, when the planting, harvesting and sale of quick-growing vegetables had resumed down in the plains, there were still many places on the Northern Cross-Island Highway where the road bed was continuing to collapse and the surface still being washed away, and rocks were still falling down the mountainsides. As for various farming access roads which were never graded or built on proper foundations in the first place, whenever it rains many of them simply "disappear." "We hope we can get them all repaired by the end of the year," says an employee at Fuhsing Rural Township Council's civil affairs department, "for after all tourism is very important to Fuhsing Rural Township."
More than 10 years ago NTU's geography department made a survey of the sources of silt flowing into the Tsengwen, Shihmen and Techi Reservoirs. The survey revealed that silt in the Tsengwen Reservoir mostly originated from natural landslips in the upstream Mt. Ali area; however, the main source of silt in the Techi reservoir was land clearance to plant temperate fruit trees at Lishan. Work on the Shihmen Dam began in 1958, and the construction of the Northern Cross-Island Highway started the next year. The road twists and turns along above the 16-kilometer length of the Shihmen Reservoir, and runs through the reservoir's water catchment area, crossing Fuhsing Rural Township and the Atayal tribal settlements. The Northern Cross-Island Highway has been the ruin of the Shihmen Reservoir.
Today, the roads on which fruit is transported down the mountains encourage more and more tourists to visit the area, and this in turn boosts the demand for fruit so that more and more roads are needed. This and the fact that provincial and city assembly members use their ability to get funds for local road building as a vote-winning strategy, has caused the cycle of fruit farming and road building to snowball throughout Fuhsing Rural Township.
Roads of peril
But the principle which local governments and farmers apply to road building is one of "natural attrition." If they have a NT$1 million budget, the local authorities would rather dispense with a proper road bed, earth retaining walls and drainage ditches, and instead build the road longer-they prefer to let soil conservation measures go by the board rather than sacrifice length. Once the road is built, they don't budget any funds for its upkeep, and the reservoir authorities, which have absolutely no jurisdiction over these roads, are constantly having to find funds for soil conservation work.
At a meeting to review water quality held by Legislative Yuan members from Taoyuan County, Shihmen Reservoir Administration Bureau director Huang Chin-jung said that upstream of the reservoir there are 40 access roads with a total length of 100 kilometers, and these are the main reason why the reservoir suffers such severe silting.
Typhoon Herb left most of these 40 access roads in tatters, and "all the sand and soil released went into the reservoir," says a Shih-men Reservoir soil and water conservation department engineer.
One consequence of preferring long roads over good ones is that whenever it starts raining, drivers start to rush to escape before the roads turn to mud and they are trapped. Thus these access roads become roads of peril.
The mountain road from Lower Paling to Upper Paling is packed with tourists at weekends and holidays, so the rural township council applied to the Taiwan Highway Bureau for a bus service between the two. But despite many revisions, the Highway Bureau has continued to refuse the application, because the road is just too steep and dangerous. "It serves them right-they just shove a road through wherever they want," says a Highway Bureau bus driver, "but if there's an accident, who will take responsibility?" To enable vehicles to cope with the many such access roads which do not conform to road building regulations, car manufacturers in Taiwan are said to convert even 800 cc cars to four-wheel drive, so that however bad the surface and however narrow the road, these little cars can still chug their way up to the top.
Town building by stealth?
Whether planting orchards or building roads, people apply what botanist Chen Yu-feng describes as the "street vendor principle": first they set fires on the mountainside to clear the ground, then go in with excavators to gain access and cut a road. Next they plant tea and fruit trees, and last of all they build houses. In this way, a "new town" is finally built. But this style of land use leaves the hills denuded, and when the rains come they bring landslips, the reservoirs turn yellow and turbid, and the people downstream get muddy water to drink.
Looking down from Paling tribal settlement at the houses which were washed down into the Tahan River bed by the flood, their orange roofs make them look like colored Lego bricks dropped from the sky. In the end, it looks as if this "new town building process" in Fuhsing Rural Township will have benefitted nobody.
As the forests of Fuhsing Rural Twonship are gradually replaced by orchards, who will earn big money? And who will bear the social costs?
Earnings from growing bamboo and planting trees do not compare with those from fruit farming. The Fuhsing Rural Township Council thinks it is perfectly understandable that aboriginal reserved land is being replanted with fruit trees.
Will Fuhsing Rural Township, where houses can be built everywhere--even on exposed ridges --draw any benefit from this "new town building campaign"?
