The Birth of the Annual Grafting Pear: Peasant Household Economy and Agricultural Technology Innovation in Dongshi, Taiwan

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between the contemporary Taiwanese peasant household economy and agricultural technology innovation, taking the economic development process involving the Dongshi annual grafting pear as an example. The “annual grafting pear” is the result of a fruit cultivation model pioneered by the peasants of Dongshi in order to overcome the constraint of climate. Temperate pears have a high market value, but raising them in a subtropical region comes at the cost of a several fold increase in labor. Although the government’s local agricultural extension station generally believes that growing annual grafting pears is not in line with the trend of modern agricultural development, peasants have stuck with this labor-intensive fruit cultivation model. Today, annual grafting pears have become the mainstay of Taiwan’s pear industry. Combining participant observation, oral history, and ethnography, this article analyzes the tensions between household consumption needs and labor self-exploitation. It argues that the peasant family economy does not operate according to a purely capitalistic business logic, and that Dongshi’s grassroots agricultural technology innovation will move in the direction of labor-intensifying diversified crops rather than labor-saving single crops. This direction of development is a response to Taiwan’s agricultural crisis, the urban-rural relationship, and the market structure. The birth of annual grafting pears as a product of the collective creation of the peasants in Dongshi reflects a situation common in Taiwan’s rural areas and helps us to rethink the “hidden agricultural revolution” and urban-rural relationships in East Asian industrialized societies.