An Era of Severe Labor Shortages: Taiwan's Agricultural Crisis, Challenges, and New Responses.
Rebecca Wang（China Productivity Center Agricultural Innovation Department II）
With the rising concerns over global food security and climate changes, labor shortages in agriculture are now a critical challenge for governments and agricultural industries worldwide. Even with outstanding agricultural technologies and high-value, precision farming, Taiwan is also confronted with structural problems such as an aging rural population, a shrinking agricultural workforce, and rising labor costs. These issues have far-reaching implications for national food security, agricultural sustainability, and international competitiveness, making them matters of strategic national security. They are also among the most pressing issues on the national development agenda of many Asian countries.
This article examines the current state of Taiwan's agricultural labor shortage, government policies, and representative cases with the attempt to explore the emerging trends and provide a comprehensive outlook of the challenges and the potential solutions.
1. The Era of Agricultural Labor Shortages: Multiple Challenges of Population Aging, Workforce Decline, Rising Wages, and Environmental Uncertainty
According to a study conducted by Taiwan’s Control Yuan, Taiwan had approximately 548,000 agricultural workers in 2020, but more than half of whom were aged 65 or above. By 2021, the average age of Taiwan’s farmers had reached 67.84. With limited interest among younger generations in pursuing agricultural careers, workers under the age of 45 accounted for less than 15% of the total agricultural workforce, resulting in a structural decline in rural productivity.
Compared with office-based jobs, agricultural work requires substantially greater input of time, energy, and physical labor. For example, harvesting water lotus offers an hourly wage of up to NT$250; however, the work means workers remaining bent over in water for extended periods, creating significant physical demands. Besides, many agricultural jobs are highly seasonal, offer less employment stability, and generally lack the long-term training systems and career development pathways commonly found in enterprises. Compared with high-paying industries, such as the technological and financial sectors, agricultural work is less attractive to younger generations.
Furthermore, global climate change has intensified extreme weather events, including frequent typhoons and floods, making agricultural production increasingly vulnerable to risks and uncertainty. According to the Ministry of Agriculture’s <Annual Report on Food Supply and Demand>, Taiwan’s overall food self-sufficiency rate in 2024 was 30.7%, lower than that of neighboring countries such as Japan and South Korea. In addition, labor shortages can lead to insufficient agricultural output, delayed harvesting, or even the abandonment of farmland, further creating concerns regarding national food security.
2. A Dual-Track Approach to Bridging the Agricultural Labor Gap
In response to the current shortage of agricultural labor, the Ministry of Agriculture has adopted a dual-track policy focusing on both the “cultivation of domestic professional agricultural workers” and the “introduction of foreign labor and migrant workers”.
It is important to note that agricultural skills vary significantly across different sectors, like farming, forestry, fisheries, and animal husbandry. Agricultural labor also exhibits a distinct characteristic of seasonal peak shortages. Labor-intensive activities such as fruit harvesting, transplanting, and sowing are concentrated during specific periods of the year.
According to a 2023 survey conducted by the Department of Farmers’ Service, Ministry of Agriculture, approximately 6% of major farming households experienced labor shortages, with 84% of these shortages attributed to a lack of temporary workers. To address this issue, the government has promoted several measures, including establishing agricultural labor databases to identify workforce needs by crop type and season; using farmers’ associations as regional agricultural human resource hubs; developing specialized work teams for fruit trees and other high-value crops; subsidizing labor-saving machinery to reduce dependence on manual labor; and implementing training and incentive programs for young farmers to enhance the younger agricultural workforce. These efforts aim to establish a long-term system of professional agricultural workers.
At the same time, Taiwan has sought to alleviate domestic labor shortages by introducing foreign agricultural workers and migrant laborers, while promoting bilateral agricultural exchanges. Currently, Taiwan relies mainly on two approaches for employing foreign agricultural workers:
Internship Program for Young Farmers from the Philippines and Indonesia (Foreign Agricultural Interns)
The program enables foreign agricultural interns to undertake internships and receive technical guidance at farms in Taiwan, while supplementing the agricultural workforce and facilitating international exchange of agricultural knowledge and technologies. Since its launch in 2019, the program has brought more than 600 foreign agricultural interns to Taiwan for internships.
Migrant Worker System
Following relevant provisions of the Employment Service Act administered by the Ministry of Labor, a pilot program was launched in 2019 to recruit migrant workers for agriculture. The number of agricultural migrant workers has expanded from an initial 800 to approximately 20,000 by May 2025. Depending on the specific agricultural sectors involved, migrant workers must receive approval before engaging in designated types of agricultural work. They have now become an important source of labor for Taiwan’s agricultural sector.
The introduction of foreign labor has helped solve seasonal labor shortages in agriculture, allowing local farmers to devote more attention to management, production planning, and market strategies, reducing the burden on local farmers and also stabilizing the quantity and quality of agricultural production.
3. Have Migrant Workers Helped Alleviate Agricultural Labor Shortages?
The water lotus industry in Meinong District, Kaohsiung, offers a compelling example of how migrant workers help solve agricultural workforce shortages. As water lotus is cultivated in aquatic environments, farmers need to wear heavy chest waders and spend long hours in water for harvesting. The work is particularly demanding during the scorching summer months and winter cold spells, requiring considerable physical endurance. Without sufficient workers to harvest, clean, and sort the crop, mature water lotus in the pond cannot be brought to market.
To address this challenge, the Meinong Farmers' Association has participated in the Outreach Farming Service Program, through which it has applied to the Ministry of Agriculture since 2019 to recruit migrant workers. By 2025, more than 80 migrant workers had been employed on local water lotus, tomato, and banana farms. The availability of a stable harvesting workforce has significantly reduced crop losses due to delayed harvesting and labor shortages during peak seasons.
Another successful example is the Bohua Vegetable Seedling Farm in Changhua County. The farm has adopted a systematic labor-saving strategy by investing in automation and smart agricultural technologies to reduce labor costs while implementing a flexible workforce model that combines Taiwanese employees with migrant workers from overseas. At farms specializing in a single crop, where work is relatively standardized and requires less technical expertise, migrant workers can be assigned to routine production tasks from the outset. More technically demanding operations, such as vegetable seedling cultivation involving multiple crop varieties, remain primarily the responsibility of experienced local farmers. As migrant workers acquire practical cultivation skills, they can gradually transition to these more complex operations and work alongside Taiwanese staff. This complementary division of labor enables farms to maximize productivity, improve operational efficiency, and create greater economic value.
4. Beyond Recruitment: Effective Management Is the Key to a Sustainable Migrant Labor System
There are currently two models of employment for agricultural migrant workers in Taiwan. One is the Outreach Farming Service Model, under which farmers' associations, fishermen's associations, agricultural, forestry, fishery, or livestock cooperatives, and qualified non-profit organizations serve as the legal employers. The other is the Direct Employment Model, in which individual farm owners, livestock operators, forestry enterprises, or aquaculture businesses directly recruit and employ migrant workers.
Once migrant workers are recruited, they are protected under Taiwan's Labor Standards Act. Occasionally, farm owners with little or no prior experience as employers may inadvertently violate labor regulations due to unfamiliarity with legal requirements. Common issues include language barriers, failure to pay statutory overtime wages, payment below the minimum wage, unlawful withholding of wages, or assigning migrant workers to unauthorized worksites or to jobs outside the scope of approved agricultural employment.
In addition, many migrant workers come to Taiwan with the primary goal of maximizing their savings. Consequently, they often prefer to work overtime on weekends and holidays to increase their earnings. When overtime opportunities are not available, some workers choose to leave their authorized employment in search of higher-paying jobs, resulting in cases of abscondence. The number has reached 90,000 according to statistics by the National Immigration Agency in September 2025.
While the introduction of migrant workers can effectively alleviate labor shortages, the long-term success of the system depends on sound management and a supportive employment environment. The government should continue to strengthen institutional frameworks through regular and ad hoc inspections and oversight. Employment agencies should ensure legally compliant labor contracts, provide language interpretation and labor-management mediation services when needed, to monitor the well-being and employment status of migrant workers. Employers, for their part, should be thoroughly familiar with the Labor Standards Act, the Employment Service Act, and other applicable labor regulations, to formulate mutually agreed workplace rules, ensure fair treatment, and provide a safe and healthy working environment. Only through close collaboration among the government, employment agencies, and employers can a stable, sustainable, and well-managed agricultural migrant labor system be built, capable of supporting the long-term development of the agricultural sector.
5. Conclusion: The Inevitable Agricultural Labor Shortages Also Mark the Beginning of Transformation
Taiwan's persistently low birth rate, coupled with its rapidly aging population, will inevitably lead to a shrinking agricultural workforce in the years ahead. As demographic aging accelerates, the average age of farmers continues to rise, and fewer young people are willing to engage in physically demanding agricultural work, labor shortages have become not merely a temporary challenge but a reality that Taiwan must be face with.
The future development of Taiwan's agriculture requires a comprehensive and coordinated approach involving government policies, institutional reform, and the active participation of farmers. This includes promoting the modernization and digital transformation of farms through smart agriculture, cultivating a new generation of domestic agricultural professionals, establishing practical education-to-employment pathways that connect schools with agricultural enterprises, and adopting flexible migrant labor policies tailored to the needs of different regions and agricultural sectors. Only through a well-designed policy framework and supporting measures can Taiwan establish an effective and sustainable system for agricultural workforce management.
In an era characterized by declining birth rates, population aging, and intensifying global competition for food resources, the integration of smart agricultural management and mechanization offers an effective means of reducing dependence on manual labor. At the same time, government initiatives should continue to encourage young people to return to rural communities and pursue careers in agriculture, establish efficient mechanisms for coordinating agricultural labor resources, and adjust migrant worker policies in response to changing labor market conditions. Through coordinated efforts among government, industry, and the agricultural community, Taiwan will be better positioned to overcome its agricultural labor shortage and guide its agricultural sector into a new era of development.