Lately I’ve been working on trying to place my detailed ethnographic observations of a village in northern Thailand into a broader national and regional context. I’ve been looking at data from both IRRI and FAO on agricultural productivity. Here are some results from my number crunching this morning. The first graph using data from IRRI (click for a larger image) shows rice yields (tonnes per hectare) for Thailand, Japan, China and Korea along with the Asian average. The second graph using data from FAOSTAT shows garlic yields (kilograms per hectare). I have chosen garlic as it has been the most important cash crop in the northern Thai village where I have been working.
It’s not a pretty picture for Thailand. There have been modest increases in rice yields but, according to IRRI, Thailand’s yields are among the lowest in the world. This may come as something of a surprise given that Thailand is the largest exporter of milled rice in the world.
Thai garlic yields have increased a lot more (roughly trebling) but there have been similar increases in both Korea and China, both of which started from a much higher base. The gap between Thailand and the others is widening and Thailand is falling well behind the Asian average. Chinese garlic yields are almost three times higher than Thai garlic yields. Korean garlic yields in the 1970s were higher than Thai yields in 2007.
If we want to understand some of the political tensions that have become increasingly evident within Thailand over the past few years, the failure of successive Thai governments to deliver higher agricultural productivity may be one useful place to start.
I had always been under the impression that the low level of agricultural productivity in Thailand was a result of the broadly dispersed ownership of land, which divides farms into small units that can not benefit from scale.
At one point, I compared sugar cane production between Thailand and Brazil. The cost competitiveness of Brazilian sugar seemed to stem in large part from the fact that Brazilian land holding are vast and mill owners also own the crop land. In Thailand, I understand that mills own somewhere in the range of 5% of land, buying the rest from local contract farmers (at regulated prices).
I have also heard that Thailand is an outlier on charts plotting urbanization versus per capita income. Given the level of wealth in the country, Thailand has a disproportionate number of people in rural areas. I would guess this supports the small farm theory, as more people are required to farm small plots.
In terms of the impact on politics, I would suggest that the problem in rural areas is not so much that agricultural production is so low, but rather that providing people with farms that are only large enough to support subsistence and not providing them with eduction and opportunities in the cities does exacerbate the rural urban divide.
The concession/regulation model that gives most the value of much of Thailand’s wealth to a conspiracy between capital and the bureaucracy also has to play a role.
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Maybe I am dull witted, but your article still has not shed light on the question why the price of garlic in Bangkok has almost tripled in the last 4 months?
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Possibly Thais put more value on flavour than tonnes per hectare.
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Whoopla: this post is about yield, not price. I have blogged previously about garlic price fluctuations.
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Once a member of the top 30, Thailand also saw its ranking drop last year to 34th place.The country’s competitiveness suffers from protracted instability. Unsurprisingly, the quality of public institutions continues to deteriorate. Ranked 63rd in this category, Thailand has dropped 20 places over the past three years. Insufficient protection of property rights (75th) and security (85th) are of particular concern to the business community, the report said.
Aside from concerns over public health, Thailand’s technological readiness (63rd) is also lagging. Although mobile-telephone penetration is among the densest in the world, at 124 mobile subscriptions per 100 population, the use of the Internet (21 users per 100) and computers (6 per 100) remains scarce.Thailand’s government has banned over 5000 websites now. Limiting any access to the real world and what is going on. As Thailand shelters from the realities of the world it keeps droping down the list, with no way out!
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Very interesting Andrew, and I support the idea behind your analysis completely. But can you go a bit deeper?
The big change in your rice chart is China. That change is associated with a political transformation of massive proportions. So let’s put China aside.
In your chart, the ratio between the yield in Thailand and the yield in Korea/Japan has been quite stable. This gap between Thailand and Korea/Japan is a function of very different climatic, social, and technological conditions.
So what happens if you put Malaysia, Philippines, and Indonesia on the chart – countries with climatic, social, and technological conditions relatively similar to Thailand?
On the basis of OAE figures, Thai average rice yields have increased over the last decade from 2,400 to 3,200 kg/ha. I think that’s the fastest improvement in yields ever in Thailand. How it happened I can’t imagine. Maybe I’m reading the data wrong. But maybe your chart is obscuring the really important change by focusing on some less interesting comparisons.
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Are there data for India or Vietnam or the Phillipines? Just curious if these differences are a matter of tropic vs. temperate zone, or it’s something unique about Thailand.
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Google:
NECTEC + buffaloes
You will get interesting results. The Institution supports work against higher productivity in farm lands.
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Mr. Reader: of course they do. Keep ‘em down on the farm and keep ‘em quiet. If that doesn’t work, transfer more troops up there.
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Is there a lower amount of land being used for rice as opposed to other crops? Is rice a less important cash crop than before? Also are more harvests being made in a single year than previously? And would any of these make a difference to the figures?
Driving around some backwaters of Chaiyuphun province a few weeks ago I was surprised by farmers talking about second and third rice crops. I can’t remember this from previous visits to the same area over the last 25 years, but I might be wrong.
Also something must being going right by the obvious increase in standard of living. At a village market I was surprised by the number of new looking pickups, cars and bikes. 20 years ago owning a vehicle was not at all common there.
Last question. Has the use of mechanical harvesters changed the yield? I have been told that hand harvesting is far less wasteful although obviously more expensive in labour. Again 20 years I don’t think I had ever seen a mechanical rice harvester in the whole of Thailand.
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Perhaps the answer is hidden in factor productivity. There was some research on this from Peter Warr http://www.equitablepolicy.org/wpaper/200606.pdf where he concluded:-
“The results of the analysis of this paper indicate that agriculture’s contribution to economic growth in both Thailand and Indonesia included impressive rates of TFP growth. But its main contribution occurred through releasing resources which could be used more productively elsewhere, while still maintaining output, rather than through expansion of agricultural output. It is seriously wrong to characterize agriculture in these countries as ‘stagnant’, based merely on the fact that output growth is slower in agriculture than in other sectors. If agriculture had really been ‘stagnant’ economic growth would have been substantially lower because it would not have been possible to raise productivity significantly within agriculture or to release resources massively while still maintaining moderate growth of output.”
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