The wetlands at the 202 Munitions Works site in Taipei City’s Nangang District (南港) are known as “the lungs of Taipei.” Plans to build a biotechnology park on the site have caused a standoff between environmentalists on one hand and an alliance between the government and developers on the other.
Setting aside for the moment the rights and wrongs of the matter, the motivation for such a development plan is an important question deserving of serious consideration. The question is — can building a biotech park on the 202 Munitions Works site save the day for Taiwan’s biotech sector?
Taiwan has been promoting biotechnology since 1983, making it quite an early starter in the field, but 27 years later the results have not measured up to expectations. It was hoped that biotechnology would, like the electronics industry before it, work a miracle for Taiwan’s economy. The reality today, however, is that Taiwan’s biotech sector lags behind not only our neighbors Japan, South Korea, Singapore and China, but also small countries like Cuba and Israel, while Southeast Asia’s Malaysia and Thailand could catch up with Taiwan before long.
There are many reasons for this, but the ridiculous thing is that while our biotech industry has failed to get off the ground, Taiwan has achieved a different kind of “miracle” — the world’s highest concentration of biotech industrial parks.
At present, eight such parks in Taiwan have been approved and started operations and more are being added. The eight parks in operation are: the Biotechnology Plaza in Taipei’s Nankang Software Park; Hsinchu Biomedical Science Park; Pingtung Agricultural Biotechnology Park, set up under the auspices of the Council of Agriculture; Changhua County National Flower Park; Taiwan Orchid Plantation in Tainan County; Chiayi Herbs Biotechnology Park; Yilan Ocean Biotechnology Park; and Southern Taiwan Science Park in Kaohsiung County.
To this number could be added Jhunan Base in Hsinchu County, Hualien Deep Sea Water Park and the Tainan and Lujhu science parks, which are attached to the Southern Taiwan Science Park, so there are actually more than 10 such parks already in operation. Taiwan has such a high concentration of biotech parks that soon there will be one in every county. Several of these parks focus on orchids and other flowers and on culinary and medicinal herbs. To build so many agriculture-oriented biotech parks with overlapping roles is a big waste of resources.
Do domestic and overseas biotech companies require such extensive facilities? The company occupancy rate of most of these biotech parks is 30 percent or less. Why is it that after requisitioning so much land and spending such great human and physical resources, so few companies want to move into the parks?
At this stage, while Taiwan’s biotech sector has yet to take off, what biotech firms need most is not land or factories, but funding to support their operations, research and development. They need talented people who can do innovative research and work on overseas marketing, commercialization and mass production. What they need even more is a strong educational foundation and infrastructure on which to build the industry, as well as complementary measures such as appropriate laws and regulations.
What they do not need at this stage is empty hardware in the form of industrial parks scattered here and there, whose real purpose is to be flaunted as political achievements when politicians are campaigning for re-election.
Taiwan’s biotech medicine industrial base is weaker than that of countries in Europe and America, so it has much room for future development. Based on the experience of advanced biotech producers in Europe, America and Japan, biotechnology parks should be based around existing technologies and then combined with surrounding resources, so as to generate collective energy and a cluster effect in which one plus one adds up to more than two. That is the most helpful model for building a biotech sector.
In Taiwan, in contrast, cities and counties are falling over one another to get the go-ahead for biotech parks. Generally, they think biotechnology is where the money is. The central government, seeing biotech as a key area for scientific development, is willing to give it a big budget — and that can be a welcome supplement for scant financial resources at the local level. Besides, it gives local politicians a chance to show off their achievements in office. Local governments give little consideration to fair allocation of the nation’s overall resources, or to the matter of whether they are capable of building clusters of biotech industry with local characteristics.
Government decision-makers, lacking a long-term perspective, think that setting up biotech parks can demonstrate the government’s determination to promote the biotech industry and get it off the ground. However, this has turned out to be an illusion and this is one aspect of Taiwan’s erroneous biotech industrial development policies over the past quarter-century.
Building yet another biotech park on the 202 Munitions Works site would be of no benefit to Taiwan’s biotech sector under today’s conditions. We don’t need so many biotech parks and we don’t need any more government interference in the sector’s development. Only with a change in policy direction can Taiwan have a future in which life science students don’t face unemployment after they graduate.
Chiang Hoang-yung is a doctor of biochemistry and president of the Taiwan Bio-Foundation.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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