In my very-shortly-to-be-published book, Thailand’s Political Peasants, I argue that a distinctive relationship has emerged between Thailand’s rural population (which I describe as a “middle-income peasantry”) and the Thai state. This relationship is characterised by a combination of (1) relatively low agricultural productivity and (2) heavy dependence on state subsidy. This has produced a rural population for which a strong electoral relationship with the state is of central socio-economic importance.
I recently came across some comparative data on agricultural expenditure that illustrates one dimension of this argument (Table 2.4 in this paper). Some of the data are summarised in the graph below. It shows government agricultural expenditure as a percentage of agricultural GDP in a number of different Asian countries from 1980 to 2002 (and it includes the Asia average). Thailand is a strong performer on state investment in agriculture. There was a solid jump between 2000 and 2002 with the arrival of Thaksin, but the upward trajectory long pre-dates the Thaksin era.
Thailand is a big spender on agriculture but, as I have argued in some earlier posts, this has not had a dramatic effect on agricultural productivity. Thailand’s middle-income peasantry is locked into a relatively unproductive relationship with the state.
However, in terms of government investment in agriculture, Thailand is far from being the stand-out in Asia. In the following graph, I have added the data for South Korea. The contrast is striking. (Unfortunately data for Japan is not provided.) In 2002 the government’s spending on agricultural equalled almost 60% of agricultural GDP. Importantly, government action in Korea really has transformed the agricultural sector. In the context of a dramatic movement of labour out of agriculture into other sectors of the economy, agricultural productivity in Korea has climbed dramatically. I will explore this issue in more detail in a later post.
It is discouraging to see these protrayals and, even moreso, the ones in the earlier post at the link. I look forward to Mr Walker’s book.
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“Thailand’s middle-income peasantry is locked into a relatively unproductive relationship with the state.”
That has to be the best hypothesis and starting point for research that I have heard in a long time. Contrast that with a “productive relationship with the state”:
“In the span of a generation, Brazil transformed itself from a net importer of food to the world’s second-biggest agricultural exporter. Global partnerships and robust government support for agricultural research and development were key. Scientists at Brazil’s national agricultural research institute, EMBRAPA, developed soybean varieties and farming practices suited to the dry and acidic plains of Brazil, making the region a breadbasket for the world.” (Source: Scientific American Blog, Dr. Bruce Campbell, director of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) at the University of Copenhagenlink)
So what went wrong?
Other sectors have had more productive relationships with the state. What makes for a productive relationship? The openness to foreign joint ventures and technology transfer that comes from traditional Southeast Asian “ersatz capitalism” as found in the highly successful electronics, automotive and retail sectors (but not the agricultural sector) ? Thailand’s farmers are certainly protected from being reduced to workers on Chinese plantations as in Laos, but perhaps productive investment is excluded also?
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I argue that a distinctive relationship has emerged between Thailand’s rural population (which I describe as a “middle-income peasantry” and the Thai state. This relationship is characterised by a combination of (1) relatively low agricultural productivity and (2) heavy dependence on state subsidy.
Aj,Andrew,
In terms of political involvement in recent years, what you think is the more important, decisive factor between being ‘middle-income’ and being ‘heavy dependence on state subsidy’? In other words, does the fact that some of them got heavily involved in politics stem from their being ‘middle-income’ or their being state-dependent?
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Ajarn Somsak, I think it is the combination of the rural population’s “middle income” status and its heavy dependence on the state. New political and economic aspirations arise out of the modern peasantry’s middle income status. These are satisfied to some extent by the state, but in a non-transforming sort of way. It’s a version, I suppose, of the classic “middle income trap.” As I write in the conclusion to Thailand’s Political Peasants:
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I claim no expertise in this field whatsoever, but I have been included on periodic university tours of “sufficiency economy” model farms and enterprises, and my overall impression is that they seem somewhat unimaginative. Perhaps I am being overly pessimistic, but in the long term they seemed doomed to lock the participants into rather subsistence levels of farming. Is it the case that blind obedience to what seems to me to be an outdated doctrine slowing down Thailand’s agricultural productivity?
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One needs to be suspicious of economic statistics. High productivity tends to mean high profit, which is directed into the incompetent banking system. Rather than being directed into agricultural research, it is used to generate global economic instability, with a high probability that the money will be squandered and lost. Low productivity may mean a high proportion of the wealth generated going into wages which feed, house, and clothe the rural population rather than falling into the hands of fools.
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R N England
Thailand is the world’s no.1 rice exporter but it has the agricultural output of Bangladesh: poor soil, poor systems, poor infrastructure, no storage facilities for farmers to store their paddy putting them at the mercy of middlemen.
I assume that’s what Andrew is referring to.
Many people such as IRRI and FAO say Thailand needs to invest in R&D and infrastructure, a key part of infrastructure being education and agriculture specific education. One can ask why no government has really put much effort in here.
Subsidies are a useful tool of political control. If Thai farmers could grow more productively and sell their crops for more due to higher quality or increased volume, then farming could revive itself as a profitable venture, something which could slow the generational drain from rural communities.
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Thailand’s position as number 1 rice exporter is very likely to overtaken by both Vietnam and India in the near future – according to Bloomberg and US Dept of Agriculture it will happen this year.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-09/india-set-to-pass-thailand-rival-vietnam-as-top-rice-exporter.html
I often wonder if productivity is stymied by lack of access to wider aspirational aims – political, cultural, social.
If you know, despite working hard, despite being both “successful” and productive you’ll still be doomed to a status where even your vote every four years is dismissed as being the product of being “uneducated”, why bother?
Maybe that’s harder to measure than subsidies.
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While accepting the main hypothesis, some special aspects of Thai rice agriculture may also be relevant. The main rice export is high value aromatic non-miracle variety rice. Many areas lack water control and so must grow floating rice which does not benefit much from fertilizer and cannot use the high yielding IRRI varieties. It is true that if there were more R&D, investment and education, these constraints could be loosened or overcome, but the immediate benefit of doing so is lessened because the premium value of rice would be lost in switching to IRRI varieties. The other salient point is that so many families remain in farming, unlike Korea.That points to a lack of structural change – indeed since 2002, the share of agriculture in GDP has actually increased from 9% to 12%!
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The contrast with South Korea is quite useful for explaining Thailand’s relatively low productivity, despite government investments. First, it highlights the impact of Thailand’s “land abundance” (emphasized by Ajarn Ammar). Second, and related to the previous point, it highlights the lack of a politically restive rural population in Thailand, at least relative to the conditions in South Korea that gave rise to that country’s “samaeul undung” program that combined land reform with quite effective agricultural extension. Finally, it highlights the fact that Thailand’s manufacturing sector has not been the kind of attraction for labor into the formal sector seen in South Korea (and Taiwan, which was a prime case for Lewis’ “turning point”). Overall, I very much look forward to reading Andrew’s new book!
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I have no particular expertise in this area, but I have been interested in the topic for some time, especially rice production. Two salient scraps of information are: Thailand lies in the middle of Asia where there is a food deficit almost as high as that in the Middle East and Africa (http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/05/daily-chart-17?fsrc=nlw), and yet Thailand’s rice yield per hectare, for example, has been one of the poorest in the world (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/agr_yie_ric-agriculture-yield-rice).
I have no idea how much Thailand invests in its own agricultural R&D and technology transfer or in obtaining this information from overseas, but I suspect that it is relatively little. Whatever, from my own experiences teaching in a local school and university in Northeastern Thailand, farming in this country does seem to have a very low occupational status. To use the vernacular, agriculture is not ‘sexy’, and young people in rural areas continue to be attracted to jobs in the cities. Farming represents an old-fashioned and poorly-paid existence outside what is seen as the exciting new world of high-tech materialism.
Thailand badly needs an effective strategy for reversing out of this. To some extent this appears to be recognised, as suggested by this article in the Bangkok Post:
http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/295852/food-security-at-risk-as-students-shun-agriculture
Whether any Thai government will actually do anything sensible about the problem is anybody’s guess, but the barriers of greed, corruption, political ineptitude and a narrow focus on short-term paybacks will make it difficult.
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“Productivity” in economic parlance is a loaded word, like “reform”. People are meant to think that they must inevitably be good things like motherhood. But both tend to mean that actual useful production is done by fewer and fewer people using more and more fossil fuels, while an increasing proportion of the population are left to invent games to play against each other for money, living by taking a cut like the “house” in a casino. When the useless people get a bit tired of playing games (“allocating resources”) the system collapses, taking useful production along with it. Conventional capitalist economics is of such little help in solving the problems we now face, that its parlance “ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention”.
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Dave Dapice: “The main rice export is high value aromatic non-miracle variety rice. Many areas lack water control and so must grow floating rice which does not benefit much from fertilizer and cannot use the high yielding IRRI varieties. It is true that if there were more R&D, investment and education, these constraints could be loosened or overcome, but the immediate benefit of doing so is lessened because the premium value of rice would be lost in switching to IRRI varieties.”
Thanks. That answers one question I had, namely whether rice growers in Thailand had taken advantage of IRRI’s research projects that are redefining rice cultivation with new genetically engineered varieties such as flood resistant rice (that would seem to be more important because of recent floods in Thailand), the result of decades long forward looking research projects at IRRI. (Source: IRRI seminar with YouTube & powerpoint)
Based on newspaper articles a year or two ago, similar varieties to Thailand’s Hom Mali aromatic varieties of rice that don’t violate Thai IP rights have been bred by others, so this “premium variety” advantage doesn’t seem like it will be permanent.
So, it seems like Thailand, although it has not availed itself of these new technologies at IRRI yet, may need to do so in the future? (Any info on rice agronomy you could give regarding these issues (links, citations) would be much appreciated.
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I join in saying how much I would appreciate links to information on what can be grown in Thailand, especially better rice and alternatives along with best methodologies. My particlar interest is central Issarn.
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Few things help people appreciate each other’s efforts more than delicious food, which is at the heart of Thai culture. Thailand produces the best-tasting rice in the world. If a bunch of accountants proposed a reorganisation of the French cheese industry (inevitably it would be along the lines of McDonalds) in order to increase its “productivity”, what would be the reaction? Something like “We fart in your général direction!”, I hope.
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phktresident: “.. how much I would appreciate links to information on what can be grown in Thailand, especially better rice and alternatives along with best methodologies. My particlar interest is central Issarn.”
The IRRI “agronomy challenge blog” provides detailed info on rice growing. Sure some of Isan’s conditions are different, like salinity in the soil, I guess. If someone blogged like this in Thailand it might be useful:
“Dr. Achim Dobermann is IRRI’s deputy director general for research. Achim has started blogging about his challenge to personally grow rice following recommended best practices to test them out and see why more farmers might not be adopting them.” (Source: Blog)
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Thanks jonfernquest — I’ll check it out shortly.
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VORSICHT!
Dr Achim Dobermann is a notorious and controversial advocate of hybrid rice technology. He is very much the face of the “new” IRRI–an IRRI that is content to serve, pathetically, as the farm team for biotech firms with appallingly low levels of understanding of the Asian farmer.
This is not the place in which to speculate about the much feared Dr
Dobermann’s motives or his willingness/unwillingness to engage in good faith in debates over his beloved cause of hybrid rice technology. It is, however, the place to note that Thailand’s rate of adoption of hybrid rice seed has historically been so low in comparative terms as to make it an outlier. One reason for this, perhaps the primary reason, has been the country’s commitment to high-quality, high-value rice.
Of course, current Thai government policy on rice procurement has so distorted the Thai rice economy as to make many “normal” assumptions and considerations irrelevant.
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Suriyon Raiwa: Thanks for the feedback. Will be certainly be on the lookout for this controversial side. Just trying to piece together all the pieces of the rice sector including debates and controversies. Don’t seem to be many general overview review pieces devoted to this all important sector
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Not being an expert there are too many questions, Andrew’s book will be welcome but the question for me is are there irrigated areas in Issarn that support hybrids? Is there much Hom Marli in Issarn? Surely Thailands rice bowl is the central region, and the south, but are there exports from the north and northeast – are they increasing? is their potential for increase? is there a need to increase in these areas? Water is a problem in Issarn, it seems that political constraints may make sure it stays that way, after all it does not seem to have changed much over the past 40 years!
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Allan, the old name for the kingdom in the north, Chiang Mai, is Lanna, which translates to Land of a Million Rice Fields.
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Has any attempt been made to analyse within the agricultural sector, where most of the investment is made? For example, how much is spent on crop price subsidies, R & D, general agricultural infrastructure and specifically, irrigation development? I was under the impression that until a few years ago, 50 % of the Min of Ag and Coop’s budget was devoted to the Royal Irrigation Dept, which a reliable source in FAO told me, spent the vast proportion (80 % +) of its budget on infrastructure.
Contrary to popular opinion, Isaan has had vast sums of money spent on developing irrigation infrastructure, at small, medium and large scales, but the trouble is, most of it has failed or been abandoned by potential users (i.e. the semi-mythical Isaan “farmer”). Just building infrastructure is not a guarantee it will be used, or indeed, that it was really wanted in the first place. Of course, if one is discursively, constructed as a farmer, and a “poor rice farmer” in a “dryland” at that, then it is inevitable that the state’s and allied strategic groups top priority is going to be “water provision”, and no expense will be spared to provide it in unlimited quantity, or at least create a utopian dream that it is possible, with enough votes and budget spent on developing out of basin sources (as in-basin sources are now mostly over-developed already), and so the American West-style hydraulic mission proceeds relentlessly.
This is why a breakdown of the figures within the “agricultural expenditure” sector, are really quite crucial.
PS: Allan, “water” per se is not a problem in Isaan, but water resources management is. And vast quantities of jasmine rice are grown in the central provinces of Isaan, focused on the Tung Kula Rong Hai area.
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banphai: “yet Thailand’s rice yield per hectare, for example, has been one of the poorest in the world”
But it’s pretty good rice isn’t it? For perspective, Thailand’s yield is about half the average, and this is an average pumped up by the huge quantities produced in the US, Australia and Europe – the top Asian country is China at #8. On that same website check fertilizer usage (figures supplied are total, not just rice). As two commenters above have reminded us: don’t just dwell on the bare numbers – check out the value side.
David Blake: “Isaan has had vast sums of money spent on developing irrigation infrastructure, at small, medium and large scales, but the trouble is, most of it has failed or been abandoned”
I planned to remind you of the Tung Kula Rong Hai region and was somewhat surprised you mentioned it right at the end. Tung Kula Rong Hai – to paraphrase: the region that made the Kula people cry (the Kula were travellers renowned for their toughness) – was known for its high salinity and desert-like conditions until it was irrigated and is now known as the rice basket of Isarn. I don’t know which budget the work came out of, or if the work was done back in the days when projects depended on effort more than money but you can’t consider this to have been a failure.
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JW: “I planned to remind you of the Tung Kula Rong Hai region and was somewhat surprised you mentioned it right at the end. Tung Kula Rong Hai – to paraphrase: the region that made the Kula people cry (the Kula were travellers renowned for their toughness) – was known for its high salinity and desert-like conditions until it was irrigated and is now known as the rice basket of Isarn. I don’t know which budget the work came out of, or if the work was done back in the days when projects depended on effort more than money but you can’t consider this to have been a failure.”
It rather depends on what you consider to be “a failure”? I was talking about public irrigation infrastructure projects and that has failed, as far as I understand, in the TKRH region as much of elsewhere in Isaan. There is an extensive literature in English and Thai on the history of failure of state irrigation projects, from Green Isaan, through the Khong-Chi-Mun, through the pumped irrigation projects of various govts, etc, etc, if you care to look. Try googling “Molle, Floch, Thailand, irrigation” for some of the English language papers.
Just to confirm that TKRH hadn’t suddenly become an irrigation success story, since I last visited it several years ago, I just tried looking at it from a Google Earth satellite image and sure enough, there was no evidence of dry season irrigated cropping wherever I looked in the Buriram-Surin-Roi-Et-Mahasarakham floodplain lowlands of the River Mun, but LOTS of evidence of abandoned irrigation infrastructure. Please check it out for yourself. Much of the infrastructure was built under the K-C-M project mentioned above, but there was more added under the Thaksin regime, as a prelude to his Water Grid fantasy. Bear in mind that millions of dollars have been spent on trying to irrigate this area year round, yet there appears to be nothing to show for it, bar scars on the ground visible from several miles high in the air.
What rice is grown on TKRH, I strongly suspect, is mostly either wet season “rainfed” (a misnomer, but I don’t want to go into the reasons here) and flood irrigated, or is irrigated by farmers’ own pumps during periods of water scarcity. It is possible some may be irrigated by communal state-provided pumps, but from my experience, such projects do not last very long and are inherently unsustainable due to a host of issues. Gravity-fed irrigation, as I am sure you are aware, is unfeasible on such flat landscapes that lack both water storage reservoirs and, well, slopes to deliver the water. Pumped irrigation, meanwhile, has a host of problems associated with it, which can be researched in one of Floch and Molle’s papers, if you are interested.
My final point concerns the characterisation of the TKRH region as “desert-like”, which actually is a terrible (but all to common) exaggeration, but often universalised construction across the “arid” Northeast, which ignores the fact it was formerly a flooded grassland for 4-6 months of the year (i.e. a wetland), and has rainfall in the region of 1,200 – 1,500 mm per year. The Aussie “experts” who descended en masse in the 80s and 90s to “develop” it (upsetting its natural fertility and ecology in the process), had to introduce eucalyptus trees to lower the water table and put some salt-tolerant trees on the landscape, thereby setting off a trend of eucalypt-ophilia in the Forestry Dept and other actors, that still resounds around Isaan today. Again, a look at a map will show plenty of water sources on and around the plain. Hardly very desert-like, in my book.
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David Blake: “I was talking about public irrigation infrastructure projects and that has failed, as far as I understand, in the TKRH region as much of elsewhere in Isaan.”
I’m no hydrologist, yet I have spent time in the Isarn region, including Tung Kula Rong Hai – i don’t need to look at it from Google Earth thanks!
I was just wanted to provide some cultural background on this region – it’s regarded as a huge success story in Thailand – their folklore makes it sound like there weren’t two fertile villages within a day’s walking distance from each other before it was irrigated. I imagine they’re referring to a period well before the Australians arrived.
“I just tried looking at it from a Google Earth satellite image … scars on the ground visible from several miles high in the air”
Before I open Google Earth … there must be an irrigation scheme in Isarn that’s actually working, so could you provide me two coordinates: one showing the ‘scars’ and one showing a working system? Thanks
I’ll leave it for others to describe, in qualitative terms, how wet the summers were in Tung Kula Rong Hai in days of yore. A running theme in this thread is that numbers don’t necessarily tell the story.
BTW I don’t think dry season irrigated cropping, Tung Kula Rong Hai or wherever, is the Holy Grail. Doesn’t the best rice come form regions where they don’t do that? We come back to the value proposition …
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David Blake: “Try googling “Molle, Floch, Thailand, irrigation” for some of the English language papers.”
That is the magic key which unlocks a treasure trove of knowledge. Thanks.
Bibliography for François Molle (link).
Two great papers:
Molle, F.; Floch, P. 2008. The “Desert bloom” syndrome: Irrigation development, politics, and ideology in the Northeast of Thailand. Mekong Program on Water, Environment and Resilience, IRD/IWMI. (link)
Floch, P.; Molle, F. 2007. Marshalling water resources: A Chronology of irrigation development in the Chi-Mun river basin, Northeast Thailand. Mekong Program on Water, Environment and Resilience, IRD/IWMI. (link)
Ron Torrence: “Allan, the old name for the kingdom in the north, Chiang Mai, is Lanna, which translates to Land of a Million Rice Fields.”
That is not very relevant to modern rice economies but the late Hans Penth’s paper just now available online since the Siam Society just put its journal online is worth reading on this subject:
On Rice and Rice Fields in Old Lan Na, Hans Penth JSS VOL 91 (2003) (link)
[Note: My ultimate objective is to understand the premodern political economy of irrigation in mainland Southeast Asia, so I can finish my research work: The Ecology of Burman-Mon warfare and the Pre-modern Agrarian State (1383-1425) (link)]
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“the old name for the kingdom in the north, Chiang Mai, is Lanna, which translates to Land of a Million Rice Fields.”
Lanna (lan = million, na = rice field) is the current name for a kingdom that occupied present-day Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, Lamphun provinces plus a large swathe of northern Laos, whose capital was the city of Chiang Mai.
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One of the issues with irrigation in the NE, is that most of the channels and so on constructed in the 1960s, with considerable assistance from USAID, were in areas that might have been excellent for irrigation but were in areas that have now been built upon as towns/cities expanded.
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JW: “Before I open Google Earth … there must be an irrigation scheme in Isarn that’s actually working, so could you provide me two coordinates: one showing the ‘scars’ and one showing a working system?”
A “working” irrigation scheme is a subjective term too. There are RID gravity-fed schemes that provide water to farmers in Isaan, but the land irrigated is a relatively small fraction of their theoretical command area in the dry season (usually in the order of 10 -25 %). In the rainy season, water becomes less of a limiting factor and some years, farmers in irrigation schemes can rely on rainfall runoff to get a reasonable crop of rice, the same as neighbouring farmers in so-called “rain-fed areas”. Irrigation in the rainy season tends to be supplementary and often not critical to success, unless there is a long dry spell – something more likely to occur the further south and west one goes in Isaan as a general rule of thumb. However, floodplain lowlands under state irrigation systems have a higher water retention capacity and less vulnerable than the prevalent middle/upper floodplain terraces (which also tend to be sandier soils) to dry periods, and those areas tend not to be irrigated.
A typical RID large-scale gravity-fed scheme, might be Nong Wai (Nam Phong Basin) in Khon Kaen province, with coordinates:
16 32’06.46″ N 102 53’07.70″ Eye elev. 6.65 kms
A semi-abandoned pumped irrigation scheme (slightly to the east of the TKRH plain proper), which is probably RID built, but may have been a legacy of the Dept of Energy Promotion K-C-M project is visible here, with its tendrils of canals clearly visible stretching across the landscape near Ban Nam Om, Yasothon, with no apparent irrigation:
15 25’11.73″ N 104 13’13.54″ E Eye elev 15.25 kms
In the rainy season, farmers would be loath to pay the pumping costs, but on RID gravity schemes the water is gratis. The tax payer is footing a huge bill for irrigation infrastructure that is not producing extra food or incomes. Hope this helps.
For Jon Fernquest, you might also be interested in some of the past papers on Isaan socio-ecological transformations and the hydropolitics of the Lower Mekong Basin by Chris Sneddon.
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