TAIPEI, Taiwan — A recent Chinese Communist military exercise around Taiwan has raised the specter of a blockade to subjugate the island democracy through starvation and the loss of other vital resources.
“Yes, this is a potential scenario,” Taiwan’s Agriculture Council Deputy Minister Junne-Jih Chen told reporters. “We have increased our food supply, and we have planned for food substitution.”
Food supplies represent a basic vulnerability for China and Taiwan, as both governments rely on imports to feed their respective societies. Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping has acknowledged his concern that the United States has the power to choke off China’s food imports. For Taiwan, the danger may be more acute — and emblematic of the many logistical difficulties that could confront Taiwanese leaders tasked with meeting domestic needs while trying to thwart Beijing’s predations.
“This is a similar issue to, essentially, any basic necessities in Taiwan,” said Marcin Jerzewski, who leads the Taiwan office of the European Values Center for Security Policy. “Taiwan very heavily relies on imports of all sorts … energy, fuel, and heavily relies on imports of food products. So I think that it will be really imperative for Taiwan to consider how to diversify agricultural production in a way that could provide the island with more self-sufficiency.”
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The status of Taiwan is a controversy of deep significance not only to Taiwan and China, but to the U.S., which regards the island and its democracy as a vital link for the balance of power across the Indo-Pacific. Chinese Communist officials claim sovereignty over the island, even though their regime has never ruled there. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen describes Taiwan as a sovereign country, but Taiwanese leaders take care not to assert that independence in terms that China would regard as a trigger for war. The U.S. cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan in order to establish an embassy in Beijing, but U.S. law requires American leaders to maintain friendly unofficial relations with Taiwan and arm the Taiwanese military to deter or repulse a Chinese invasion.
Chen implied that Taiwan would request rapid deliveries of food shipments from abroad if a military crisis appeared imminent.
“For food security in Taiwan, we have developed well-rounded measures to ensure enough food supply for the people of Taiwan,” he said. “To ensure the security in Taiwan, in addition to our long-term procurement contracts, we also hope our neighboring countries can help us to import and deliver food to Taiwan in a more timely manner if necessary.”
Taiwan has a shortage of land suitable for farming, an inherent problem given the size of the population relative to the island territory and one exacerbated in recent decades by the conversion of arable land into manufacturing sites and solar panel farms. The fragility of Taiwan’s food import supply chain was laid bare in 2020, when Argentina’s coronavirus restrictions “caused a significant crisis for Taiwan’s pig farmers” by halting the export of corn for feeding the livestock.
The supplies of food for humans has similar logistical vulnerabilities. “As an island nation, food supply depends on international trade and is regarded as dangerous,” the Taipei-based Food and Fertilizer Technology Center for the Asian and Pacific Region warned in 2020. “In 2018, Taiwan’s food self-sufficiency in terms of calories basis was only 35 percent.”
Taiwan’s agriculture officials are trying to avoid a rerun of the pig farm crisis through long-term planning. “Some crops are self-sufficient in Taiwan, so we are going to maintain the self-sufficiency rate,” Chen said through an official interpreter. “For some [food] used for animal feed such as soybeans and corn, we will start supplying for long-term procurement contracts.”
The agriculture council officials addressed the journalists during a junket arranged by the Taiwanese government to advocate Taiwan’s admission into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade agreement linking 11 economies across the Pacific Rim and the Americas.
The agriculture ministry officials noted that more than a quarter of Taiwan’s food imports come from countries in the Trans-Pacific Partnership while more than 30% of Taiwan’s food exports are sold in the bloc. The exports are “tropical fruits, fishery products, flowers, etc.,” according to the agency, while Taiwan depends on those countries to supply “palm oil, soybeans, wheat, kiwi, beef, etc.”
The difference between those two categories points to Taiwan’s larger food problem, which could worsen if Taiwan enters the TPP without a plan to rebalance its domestic production in favor of essentials.
“Unfortunately, something that has been characteristic of Taiwanese agriculture for decades, if not centuries, is the tendency for farmers to jump into high value cash crops, essentially creating monocultures,” Jerzewski said, lamenting that there is “a heavy focus on products that yield high prices on the retail market but are not necessarily bolstering the nation’s human security.”
The strategic vulnerabilities that arise from farmers choosing to grow crops that will be popular overseas have gone rather neglected by security officials, who are accustomed to thinking of food security in terms of how Taiwan can aid other countries.
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“So, Taiwan is used to seeing itself as a provider of [food] security to developing nations,” Jerzewski said. “It’s difficult for Taiwan to think of itself as a place that might potentially be at the other side of the table, where it needs assistance with its own food security.”
Chen, the agriculture council deputy minister, maintained that officials have a plan for how to feed their people, but he acknowledged it wouldn’t be pleasant.
“Taiwan will remain self-sufficient,” he said while contemplating the prospect of a blockade. “But, if this scenario happens, we will not focus on whether this food tastes good or not. We will focus on whether we can live on this.”
