Strategies to improve the competitiveness of the agricultural sector and farm income in response to the trade liberalization

Erin Chang

The fertilizer subsidy in Taiwan has successfully led to a significant increase of production in previous decades. However, the result has been an over application of fertilizer as well as environmental problems. Agri-environmental contracts are widely used to provide incentives to reduce negative environmental impacts. The success of the agri-environmental scheme will highly depend on the farmers’ participation. This research project focuses on specific scheme design factors to investigate farmers’ preference on different attributes of chemical fertilizer reduction scheme in order to provide the authorities with useful information. This information pertains to developing a more attractive scheme for farmers in the future. The data were collected from rice farmers in Taiwan.