A Study on Taiwan's Food Dollar Series

For understanding the overall food system and providing the framework of the value added agriculture in 10 years, this paper examines, with a filter of the U.S. ERS food dollar series, Taiwan’s food dollar series through the final market demand by using the 2001, 2006, and 2011 Input-Output data, published by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting, and Statistics in Taiwan, demonstrating two denominations (nominal, real). The paper seeks to answer the following questions: “what’s the distribution of the food dollar which we pay for our daily expenditure from three different aspects in Taiwan? And how much Taiwanese farmers will earn from the food dollar?” The empirical results of Taiwan’s food dollar series in 2011 is supported by the following evidences. The marketing bill series implies that if the government continues to neglect earnings that farmers received, farm value will be shrinking over time. Second, the industry group series suggests the top four supply chain industries of value-added share are“Food Transactions,” “Food Services,” “Food Processing,” and “Farming and Agribusiness”. As for the primary factor series, Taiwanese worker salaries accounted for the largest portion, followed by operating surplus, consumption of fixed capital, and taxes on production and imports. The paper concludes that we should extend the perspectives from traditional agriculture to value-added agriculture and consider from both consumers and producers side to implement the effective and comprehensive agricultural policy.