斷裂的生命之網——1910年代台灣在來米種改良的商品化與社會生態轉變

The Rift in the Web of Life–The Commodification and Socio-Ecological Transformation in the 1910s Taiwan’s Indica Rice Variety Improvement Project by CHU Huahsuan

The Government-General of Taiwan implemented the island-wide Indica rice variety improvement project in the 1910s, with variety standardization and“red rice”elimination as the two principal measures to make Taiwan rice a suitable commodity for the Japanese rice market. Employing political economy discussion on“the commodification of nature”and utilizing the Taiwan Daily News as the major data source, this article examines the human-nature symbiosis mediated by varieties to examine how the project greatly transformed Taiwan rice’s social ecology. This article points out that the Japanese rice market since the shogunate period had developed a trading system which was highly in line with modern economy demanding for standardization of commodity quality. However, the biodiversity of Taiwan rice varieties created obstacles in production, processing, and trading to meet the demands. The project’s discourses therefore highlighted the market profitability as the primary values of the crops and homogenized the socio-ecological specifics of all species and natural entities with economic considerations, making the“web of life”in ricefarming gradually broken and disappeared. Embedded in the great wave of agricultural modernization, the 1910s project signifies a turning point of Taiwan rice’s social ecology being subjugated to serve the commodity economy.