In order to upgrade efficiency and quality in delivering services to the rural population, the COA is planning to continually expand the application of information technology (IT) to agricultural production and implementation of rural policies. This will enable us to provide better and more diversified services to farmers, as well as increase policy-making efficacy. The first stage of this process will be using IT to handle benefits that the COA offers to farmers for mechanical-fuel and fertilizer. The “Farmers Information Services Management System,” which was set up in 2013, will interface with sales tracking systems, providing services to those outside the COA while allowing more accurate data analysis inside the COA.

The COA plan is that individuals will be identified by means of their Farmer ID Cards, and can use their ID cards to collect subsidies and access various agriculture-related information platforms. As noted above, this plan will first be applied to benefits for mechanical-fuel and fertilizer.

Subsidies for fuel for registered farm machinery: Farmers who are buying fuel for their farm machinery are entitled to two benefits: (a) exemption from the operations tax on the fuel, and (b) a “price disparity subsidy” to account for price fluctuations. Currently, a farmer buying fuel must bring a paper “farm machinery user certification” for each separate farm machine. These farmers will be the main beneficiaries of the application of IT, because in the future when buying fuel they need to use only their Farmer ID Card number. This will simplify the whole benefit process—farmers’ applications, reviews of applications by local governments, applications by fuel suppliers—and will unify the data, instead of separately keeping track of different amounts of fuel for different types of farm machines. The result will be lower operating costs.

Subsidies for fertilizer: Using IT, Farmer ID Card numbers can be linked to specific pieces of cultivated land, eliminating the possibility of non-farmers getting fertilizer subsidies, and ensuring that genuine farmers are the beneficiaries of these subsidies. The data will also help in rationalizing fertilizer use and tracking trends in fertilizer subsidies. The Farmers Information Services Management System will allow fertilizer sales and subsidies to be recorded in a single database.

In the future we will continue to find ways to apply IT to agriculture. Through better data management, we will improve policy implementation, maintain an up-to-the-minute grasp of agricultural production, and provide concrete data for policy-making. Through the “cloud,” we can develop new Internet service functions, and provide the rural population with more comprehensive and convenient services. Moreover, to make it easier for rural people to get immediate assistance, we have studied the most successful telephone-service models used by various agencies in Taiwan, and plan to create a customer service center that will answer queries on a range of subjects and immediately resolve people’s problems, further raising the efficiency of COA services.