Guantian Green Conservation Payment for Pheasant-tailed Jacana Farmland (Tainan, Taiwan)

In 1998 Taiwan's Forestry Bureau and the Tainan City Government, working with the Wild Bird Society of Tainan and the Chinese Wild Bird Federation, launched the "Incentives to Protect the Pheasant-tailed Jacana Plan" after the species' Taiwan population had fallen below 50 birds. The jacana nests almost exclusively in the flooded water-chestnut paddies of Guantian District, Tainan — Taiwan's largest water-chestnut growing area — so its survival was tied directly to farmers not using herbicides, rodenticides, poisoned bait or animal traps on their fields.

A 2009 poisoning incident that killed 85 birds (leaving only 52 fledglings that year) exposed how fragile the arrangement still was, and pushed the Forestry Bureau and the Tse-Xin Organic Agriculture Foundation to formalise a market-based "Green Conservation Label" payment scheme from 2010: certified pesticide-free farms receive a price premium and a revenue-sharing return (branded products such as Lingsiang water-chestnut jelly return roughly 10-15% of sales to participating farmers). The Guantian pilot grew from 18 farmers on 18.3 ha in 2010 to 57 farmers on 47.4 ha by 2015, while the Green Conservation Label expanded nationwide to 186 farmers across 213.91 ha covering more than 35 protected species by the same year.

The ecological results are well documented: jacana nests in Guantian rose from 52 in 1999 to 577 in 2014, fledged juveniles from 57 to 926, and a December 2014 census counted 707 wintering birds; the population has exceeded 1,000 individuals annually since 2016, and roughly 95% of Guantian's water-chestnut farms now participate in some form of conservation-friendly cultivation. What is less clearly published is the exact scale of direct government cash subsidy per farmer — the scheme leans more on certification, price premiums and revenue-sharing than on a flat per-hectare payment, so its income guarantee to farmers is more variable than schemes with fixed per-hectare rates.

Read the full analysis: https://eng.moa.gov.tw/ws.php?id=2503979