The Dynamism of the Phalaenopsis Industry in Taiwan and the International Relay Culture System

Abstract

Trade liberalization urges farmers to explore new approaches for producing and marketing their products. Those approaches include the international "relay culture" system expanding between Taiwan and other consuming nations to grow a kind of orchid, phalaenopsis. The system has two processes: 1) Taiwanese growers specialize in growing and exporting nursery plants in their warm climate. 2) Growers in the consuming nations bloom and sell the plants in their markets where particular quality is required. This study understands the evolution of the relay culture system by analyzing the growers' adaptive changes in the Taiwanese phalaenopsis sector. Induced by the political and economical changes, and based on the result from the adaptive technological changes, each grower in Taiwan has flexibly chosen trading partners, targeting nations, and the plants' growth stage to specialize in. As a result, the export destinations have especially been diversified to US, EU, and some other nations, and the importance of Japan has declined. Although Japanese growers have been showing growing interest in the relay culture with Taiwan since the mid-2000s, Taiwanese growers are losing their incentive to persist in trading with Japanese growers who have stricter quality requirements. This gap potentially destabilizes the relay culture between the two nations.