As climate change makes weather patterns more unpredictable and typhoons more extreme, agricultural resiliency is critical for Taiwanese farmers and the general public. National Taiwan Normal University professor Mucahid Bayrak joins TaiwanPlus to discuss how farmers can maintain stable production in the face of nature's destructive power.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00How have farmers throughout Taiwan's history adapted to sudden typhoons or extreme weather scenarios?
00:07We have to understand that farming and agriculture in its very essence is about adapting. So the thing about
00:14challenging environmental
00:16environmental challenges or weather challenges or weather variability or climate variability and
00:22adapting to that is very much an essence of agriculture, an essence of farming. So we should be a bit careful
00:29in saying that in the past farmers were very much able to adapt and nowadays farmers see these environmental challenges as
00:38something that makes farming untenable in that sense. With that being said, when we look at the past
00:45certain
00:46typhoon seasons or certain, you know, climatic seasons were kind of more predictable.
00:53So when farmers would be having the harvest season or when they would
00:58grow certain crops
01:00they were perhaps more in sync with the way how weather was changing, how the climate was changing, and they could anticipate
01:09based on that using their local and traditional ecological knowledge systems.
01:14Looking forward to the future,
01:16which trends or practices might farmers adapt to as
01:20climate change becomes a larger problem and there are additional sudden typhoons or
01:26years where there are no typhoons.
01:28So we have to be very critical to say, well, what's the impact of climate change and what is it actually that farmers adapt to?
01:35With that being said, the research that we have done clearly shows that farmers experience changing weather conditions.
01:43The rainy season usually is, at least what I have learned from my research, is that it's often shorter in time
01:50but more intense. Typhoons
01:52they become more unpredictable and while climate change might not necessarily cause more typhoons to happen,
01:59typhoons are expected to become more intense. So in that sense, we need to figure out
02:04as a society, as a government, is how can we minimize the negative impacts of climate change that we can prevent?
02:12And in many ways, I would say that you should cooperate more with farmers because they are definitely able to
02:19understand what's going on in terms of changing climatic conditions.
02:22So with cooperating with farmers in mind,
02:25what then are some policies or practices that we can implement right now to add additional
02:32agricultural resiliency?
02:34Listen more to farmers. So see what issues that they are facing. A lot of
02:39places we visited, you could see farmers had like land tenure issues.
02:44What we also see a lot of indigenous people do more and more is planting more indigenous crops, indigenous varieties of
02:51rice and millet. And we should try to encourage that in a sense that it's not only cultural heritage of farmers that we talk about
02:59but a lot of indigenous practices, indigenous crops are also better suited to changing climatic conditions.
03:06That's not that I would say that indigenous knowledge will solve climate change,
03:10but I think we need to pay more attention to that.