Blue and White have no financial resources and forcefully increase the subsidies for old farmers. Yang Rumen: It’s like killing a chicken to get the eggs.

Regardless of financial resources, the Blue and White Party of the Legislative Yuan today (6th) forced the third reading to pass an increase in the pension for veteran farmers to 15,000 yuan, which is 5,000 yuan more than the 10,000 yuan version of the Political Yuan version. Starting from July this year, the Ministry of Agriculture has repeatedly expressed that it "cannot pay it out"; 2 Yang Rumen, the convener of the 48 Agricultural Science Fair, believes that the subsidy for old farmers should not be a subsidy in the first place. The government should review the past history of exploiting old farmers and advocate "repaying debts", but it should not crowd out other agricultural development, otherwise it will be like "killing the chicken to obtain the eggs."

Yang Rumen said that in the early 1950s, the government wanted to use agriculture to cultivate industry, promote "fertilizer for grain", "payment purchase", "land tax collection", etc. to exploit farmers' harvests and plunder valuable assets. Later, it extended the "Old Farmers' Allowance" to subsidize farmers' losses at that time. Therefore, he believes that the Old Farmers' Allowance is not "welfare" in essence, but should be a debt owed by the government to the old farmers, and "debts must be repaid."

However, Yang Rumen emphasized that every time an election comes, old farmers’ subsidies are increased one after another. He reiterated that the increase should be based on affordability conditions under the government’s financial planning. For example, the recent riots in France mean that the government has long diverted money to elderly care and pensions. As a result, Young people don’t even have teachers to attend classes; if the amount of subsidies for old farmers will crowd out other future agricultural development, such as subsidies for young farmers, subsidies for agricultural machinery, related technologies, arable land, breeding, new planting, marketing channel brand management, etc., it will be like "killing the goose to get the eggs."

Yang Rumen described that no one in Taiwan would object to the money they can get, but the question to ask is that if you get the money, you will be happy in the short term, but later the agricultural machinery subsidies will be cancelled, there will be no rewards for small landowners and large tenant farmers, new seeds and seedlings will not be developed, and there will even be no funds for patrolling and repairing irrigation and drainage channels. This will actually not help agriculture and even individual farmers.