Opinions about betel nuts tend to be extreme: either they have prevented Taiwan's agriculture from collapsing, or they poison people and destroy the environment. The government recently declared war on this controversial crop, but is it a case of too little, too late?
Abetel nut looks harmless enough. About the size of a walnut, with a tough green and cream outer shell, it grows in the crowns of tall trees found in the south of Taiwan, reminiscent of tropical palms. People like to chew them--so many people, and in such vast quantities, that they have become known as "Taiwan's chewing gum." The nut is spiked with a slice of a local fruit called lao-hua, and a dab of red or white paste made of lime (calcium oxide). The product helps generate saliva, and the polyphenol and alkaloid present in the nuts stimulate the digestion and give the user a kick that is mild when compared to the effects of cocaine, say, but still strong enough to create psychological dependency.
Betel nuts also stimulate huge profits and increasingly acrimonious controversy.
In Pingtung, Taiwan's southernmost county, the betel nut season begins around May. This year, at the start of the season, Huang Chun-chi (黃春桔) chaired a meeting of about a dozen betel nut dealers, who buy the crop from local planters and then sell them to distributors around the island. As each man opened his mouth to speak, it became evident why devotees of the nuts are known in local parlance as "red-lipped people." The pungent smell of the lime paste stuffing blended with the fragrance of the betel blossoms outside the house where the meeting was being held. (Kissing a betel addict has to be an acquired taste.) Betel nuts lay on the floor in baskets and piles. Machines had already sorted them by size into seven different categories, and they had then been further sorted by hand, this time according to quality, into four more groupings. The purpose of this meeting was to fix the prices of the various nuts.
Huang first asked each participant how many nuts their distributors had ordered from them and at what price. He then spent a few moments recalling his recent stroll around the betel orchards and considered how well the palms were likely to do this season. Finally, he quickly wrote down a series of prices on a whiteboard. No one raised any objections. Huang distributed wooden place-name markers around the piles of nuts, which were immediately packaged and loaded onto trucks. At their destinations, local distributors would sell them, often with ready-made lime paste, to the individual roadside stands where consumers buy them. Islandwide, at any one of the estimated 50,000 stands, they would sell at exactly the price Huang had written down the previous night.
To outsiders, this looks like a pretty weird process, but it is the end result of years of pointless, time-consuming, and money-wasting quarrels. Taiwan's betel but dealers have formed an independent, self-sustained economic circle, albeit one whose dealings lack any form of legal protection. Everyone involved in the business--planters, dealers, lime-paste manufac turers, distributors, and retailersfinds it conveniently well organized and efficient. There are no longer quarrels, and the bargaining and trade secrets frequently encountered in connection with other crops simply do not exist. It is almost a miracle that all the people involved in selling betel nuts in Pingtung should listen to just this one man--but they do.
When asked how he makes his decisions, Huang says simply, "Experience." He has been in charge of setting betel nut prices in the Pingtung area for fifteen years. "The aim is to produce a reasonable profit margin that satisfies those who want to sell betel nuts and those who want to buy them," he says. "Wrong prices upset the balance and cause confusion. My price is usually right, so people listen to me. Those who don't, lose business."
Chiayi's betel nuts ripen in August, Nantou's in September, and Taichung's in October. But the same price-fixing process applies in all betel nut producing areas, where individuals like Huang dominate the local trade.
This network has been evolving over a long period, although it expanded especially rapidly during the past decade when vast areas of rice paddies in southern Taiwan were given over to betel nuts. The wide range of fruits that used to dot the countryside has given way to one single crop, which has even spread across large areas of slopeland where agricultural cultivation is forbidden by law. According to the Council of Agriculture (COA), in 1996 some 54,000 acres of agricultural land were planted with betel palms, up from a mere 11,000 acres in 1986. In other words, the plantations have increased more than fivefold within just ten years.
The reason for this rapid expansion is straightforward: farmers know of nothing more profitable than betel nuts. It costs just a few cents to plant a betel palm, but a hectare of them can generate about US$120 a day. Just spread herbicide and fertilizer, wait about five years for the trees to mature, and sit back to enjoy a regular twice-yearly harvest for the next forty years. The COA says that in 1996, betel nuts had an annual production net worth of NT$13.6 billion (US$485 million), second only to rice among all crops grown in Taiwan. It has been estimated that as many as two million of Taiwan's inhabit ants live in whole or in part off the betel nut business, which is worth something in the region of NT$95 billion (US$3.4 billion) annually. Small wonder, then, that people call the crop "green gold."
This expansion in production was the inevitable consequence of radically increasing demand. The Department of Health (DOH) estimates that the number of people who habitually chewed betel nuts in 1996 was about 2.4 million, or 11.4 percent of the total population. Recently, curiosity about consumer behavior has given rise to a number of studies on betel nut users, who have come to be regarded as constituting a distinct social class.
One professor has made a study of this phenomenon. Chung Chen-tung (鍾震東) teaches agricultural business at the National Pingtung University of Technology. He grew betel nuts over a two-year period, for research purposes, and wrote a paper based on his experiences. He observes that the product first became widely popular in the 1970s. The economy was then export-oriented, low-tech, and labor-intensive, and it required large numbers of blue-collar workers. The more hours they worked, the more money they made.
Chewing betel nuts quickens the heartbeat and stimulates blood circulation, which helps keep the body warm in winter. Blue-collar laborers and betel nuts were made for each other, in other words, and virtually every employer would give his workers a betel handout as a means of boosting their productivity. The nuts gradually became a kind of icon that enabled blue -collar workers to identify strangers as "one of us." Offering them around became a gesture of politeness, particularly in rural areas.
Then in the late 1980s came the lifting of martial law. Numerous opposition movements emerged after long suppression, and, for them, betel nuts served the same function as the colored bands that opposition supporters used to wrap around their heads in those early days of freedom. They symbolized shared identity, non-conformity, and comradeship. In Chung's words, "When people chewed betel nuts, they were saying: 'Now I'm the boss.' Betel nuts took on social undertones in the democratization process." Part of that process was an ever-growing number of elections, and gifts of betel nuts became indispensa ble to winning the support of the majority of blue-collar workers.
At the same time, betel nut consumption rose drastically, along with that of cigarettes and alcohol--all part of the increased atmosphere of freedom on the island. This was at the peak of a bubble economy, when the local stock market indicator hit 12,000. There was simply too much money around, and betel nut stands became outlets for a widespread, hugely popular form of illegal gambling called "Everybody Happy." (This involved "bidding" for a two-digit number, and the name is somewhat misleading, because a few people did win, but a lot of others lost their shirts on it.)
Then the bubble economy burst. Unemployment increased, and many people who had failed in some other business went into the betel nut trade, which requires only limited capital investment, Naturally, they brought their business ideas with them. Specialized betel nut stands began to replace the old-style kind that were often part of a barbershop or drugstore business. And when the government cracked down on video parlors, prostitution, and sex-related industries in general, another, very different kind of betel nut stand began to emerge: bright glass and aluminum structures, garishly lit with multicolored neon strip lights and staffed by "betel nut beauties." Nowadays, these pretty girls, often very young and invariably clad in sexy clothes, have largely replaced the older housewives who used to sell betel nuts. As a marketing strategy, this makes a lot of sense, since nearly all betel nut users are male and most of them believe that the habit gives them a macho image.
But the seemingly ubiquitous nut was no longer having things all its own way. Doctors were starting to complain about it. Liang-jiunn Hahn (韓良俊), professor of dentistry at National Taiwan University, is quite certain that the nuts are a major threat to health. "In all my years as a doctor, I have seen shocking cases of oral cancer nearly every day," he says. "Most of the victims were betel nut abusers. In the end I decided to stop just sitting in my clinic, and tell the public the things I have seen."
Years of research confirm Hahn's clinical observations--betel nuts are a direct cause of oral cancer. They contain a high percentage of polyphenol compounds, which release free radicals, known to cause cancer, when in an alkaline environment. Repeated chewing of betel nuts containing lime paste causes the pH index in the mouth to go as high as 9.5, creating exactly the environment free radicals like. The act of chewing betel nut fiber creates friction and irritation which accelerate the harmful chemical reactions. Moreover, the arecoline and arecaidine substances in the nuts themselves, and the safrole in lao-hua, are known to cause DNA ruptures and distortions. This "multistep mechanism," in Hahn's phrase, first initiates and then promotes cancer.
Hahn points out that 90 percent of those who suffer from oral cancer in Taiwan are betel nut users, and oral cancer has become the fifth major cause of death among Taiwan's males, increasing at the astonishing rate of 14.58 percent annually. In Hengchun, in Pingtung county, the number of women who die of oral cancer is ten times higher than the figure in other areas of Taiwan, and there is a corresponding addiction to betel nuts among the town's females.
Instead of being known as "Taiwan's chewing gum," betel nuts are now finding themselves stuck with another, less friendly nickname: "cancer of the environment." Chen Hsin-hsiung (陳信雄) is a professor in National Taiwan University's Forestry Department. "Forests should ideally have dense, multi-level plant life, which contains humidity and consolidates the soil," he says. "But now, the mountainsides from 100 to 1,200 meters above sea-level are covered with betel palms. All other plant life has been eradicated. Betel palms are not deep-rooted and they have few leaves to keep in moisture and provide shade."
Chen's research shows that betel palms planted on slopeland cause the erosion of between 50,000 and 200,000 tons of soil a year, while the water table goes down five to twenty meters annually from the same cause. In some areas, the water table has been lowered to such an extent that seawater has taken the place of fresh.
Chen cites Mt. Ali in central Taiwan as an example of the problems. "Betel palms have followed the construction of a highway across Mt. Ali and spread like cancer," he says. "Last year, a devastating typhoon caused serious landslides. Now people are asking why rainfall has decreased in the Mt. Ali area. Both these have to do with betel palms." (Soil erosion causes landslides, and a lowered water table means drier land which does not generate enough moisture to support rainfall.) He would like to see a program of gradual reforestation of the affected area, pointing out that to eradicate betel palms altogether would only make the mountainsides even more bare and the soil more exposed.
Despite ominous warnings from professionals and environmentalists, the betel nut business went blithely on its way until the government finally decided that enough was enough. On April 10 this year, the Cabinet approved a series of "Betel Nut Regulatory Measures" proposed by the DOH. These will crack down on unlicensed betel nut stands, force people in the business to pay tax, punish those who plant betel palms on mountainsides, require health warnings to be printed on betel nut packs, outlaw underaged "betel nut beauties," and ban those under eighteen years of age from chewing the nuts. The DOH has also begun to publicize the hazardous effects of betel nuts in newspapers and on TV. The advertisements feature gruesome pictures of oral cancer victims, with nothing left to the imagination.
This marks a radical departure from previous government policy on the betel nut trade, which used to be characterized as "The Three Don'ts"--Don't encourage, Don't forbid, and Don't supervise. Under the former policy, the nuts were not classified as a crop and thus were not under the jurisdiction of the COA, nor were they classed as food and subject to regulation by the DOH. Even the palms themselves fell outside the remit of the Bureau of Afforestation. Now, however, the nuts are both crops and food, and the palms have officially become trees.
"In the past, we were orphans," says Chang Ming-hsien (張明顯), chairman of the Kaohsiung Betel Nut Processing and Packaging Association. "The government never gave a damn about us. Now, we are the target of public outrage, an evil that has to be terminated." This June 5, he organized a protest meeting of about 10,000 people connected with the betel nut business in some way, using the well-organized sales and distribution network to pull in the crowds. They staged a public protest and filed an appeal to the legislature.
"If what we sell is harmful, tell us how to improve it," Chang says. "We're willing to cooperate with the government over water and soil conservation. We're willing to pay tax. We're even willing to turn over betel nut plantations to other crops, if that's what it takes. Just tell us what to plant instead, and how to do it. But don't ignore us for all those years and then suddenly tell us to get lost. We're talking about several million people's livelihoods."
Chang says that there are too many moral judgments flying around. "People who use betel nut stands as a front for prostitution or drugs make up only a small proportion of us," he maintains. "If you say betel nuts cause cancer, make it clear which part of the nut actually does it. We can improve on that [by processing the nuts or changing the lime-paste formula]. Actually, I know a lot of old folk who love to chew betel nut and who've lived to be ninety years old, quite healthy. When their teeth fall out, they even grind betel nuts into powder. How do you explain that? If you say betel palms threaten the environment, what have you got to say about those massive golf courses built on slopeland? Are they legal because golf players are all rich people and political VIPs, while betel nut chewers are blue-collar?"
Pan Tien-chin (潘添進), an associate professor with the Agricultural Business Department at National Pingtung University of Technology, has some sympathy with the farmers. "In the total absence of official guidelines, it's only natural for them to plant whichever crop makes the most money," he says. "The government should work on developing a more comprehensive agricultural policy instead of taking farmers' livelihoods away."
So far, however, not much has been taken from anyone. The government's announcement of a hard-line war against betel nuts and those who grow them has yet to be matched with action. The truth is that this business involves too many people, all of whom vote, and it would be a mistake to think that they lack powerful political backers. It is the same with cigarettes. Everyone knows they are evil, but nobody is prepared to do anything about it, because there are too many vested interests in the way.
Just as hopefuls occasionally come up with "healthy" tobacco products, some enthusiasts are eager to herald the dawn of the non-toxic nut. Wang Chin-kun (王進崑), a professor in the Food Nutrition Department of Chungshan Medical College, claims to have developed what he calls "healthy betel nuts," the product of eight years' research. According to him, betel nuts have long been a potent ingredient in various forms of Chinese medicine, where they are used as pesticides, pupil dilators, and blood -pressure stabilizers. He cites American research published in 1989 and 1991, which says that arecaidine (a compound present in betel nuts) is helpful in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. He also maintains that a substance present in betel nuts helps prevent tooth decay, and that lao-hua leaves are rich in vitamin C.
Whether the new product will appeal to the jaded palates of hardened betel nut users, and what effect if any it will have on the nuts' future, remains to be seen. But Liang-jiunn Hahn takes all this with a grain of salt. He contends that the reason why people chew betel nuts is because they like the taste and the stimulus, which derive from the very carcinogens he condemns. Take those away, and you are left with a substance that is as innocuous--and as boring--as chewing gum. He is bitterly opposed to what he calls the "suicidal ignorance" that threatens the lives of the entire population. "But few people have enough insight to see beyond their livelihoods," he says despondently.
The government sides with the medical establishment, and has declared war on the betel nut industry. In the light of current research, that seems more realistic than spending money on seeking a panacea that may not even exist. Betel nuts? Better not.