Author：Jen-Yao Lee¹, Cheng-Hui Chang^2,4 and Chi-Yuan Lin³

Abstract：

    This research compiled how different countries or international organizations, say Japan, China, Korea, UK, or FAO, compute their food self-sufficiency ratios. This compiling helped to analyze how Taiwan differs from others in the computation, and the implication behind the calculation policy. In Taiwan, the current calculation of the all food self-sufficiency ratio or the indigenous food self-sufficiency is measured by calorie. It was found that the correlation coefficient of these two ratios approximates to 0.94. This implied the consistency between these two. However, from the statistics, the food self-sufficiency ratio is merely 32% in the year 2009, while its indigenous food self-sufficiency is up to 81.1%. Due to the limitation of weather or technology etc., Taiwan does not possess comparative advantage in producing non-indigenous food. The product differentiation results from the consumers’ demand to variety, rather than from the survival demand. Therefore, the adoption of the indigenous food self-sufficiency ratio can better reflect domestic food security degree in Taiwan. The government, when enacting the food self-sufficiency ratio policy, generally takes domestic agricultural product enhancement as the medium goal. But due to the restriction of weather or technology etc., the prevalence of non-indigenous food is not undemanding. Finally the government should aim at the improvement of indigenous food.

Keywords: food self-sufficiency ratios, indigenous food, non-indigenous food.

¹ Department of International Business, National Kaohsiung University of Applied Science.
² Department of Applied Finance, Hsiuping University of Science and Technology.
³ Department of Applied Economics, National Chiayi University.
⁴ Corresponding Author, Email: chunghui@mail.hust.edu.tw ; Tel: 886-4-24961123#2401.