Sustainable Agriculture and Indigenous Community Development: Some Experiences in Taiwan

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the efforts of indigenous communities in Taiwan through their practices of local knowledge on natural farming, which is advocated by a local indigenous preacher, to avoid the unsustainable outcomes of conventional farming. The spirit of natural farming is based on land ethics and seeks sustainable agriculture with locally-made healthy food rather than unsustainable agriculture that harms people and land health. In order to see how farming methods been transformed from conventional farming to natural farming which has been done or progressing by community people partially, this study takes Tayal indigenous community Quri as a case, and employs methods of literature review, in-depth interview for 12 people, and participatory observation during the period from 2009 to 2012. Quri Community is located on a mountainside of “Shihmen Watershed and its catchment” in Hsinchu County, Taiwan. Most of the local residents engage in farming but local land use has been restrained by the Soil and Water Conservation Act in response to landslides and the turbidity in the reservoir resulting from unsustainable farming practices. Indigenous residents have learned natural farming through workshops led by the indigenous preacher since 2009. As a result, social learning plays an important role in traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and innovation for the technique of agricultural production. Though there are difficulties that need to be overcome, we observed that the communal self-governing action such as changing to natural farming greatly improved not only the economic and social condition, but recovered culture and ecological systems of the Quri Community.