Comments

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.

Aung Moe,

Could you tell us more about the Model villages in Kachin, please?

Thanks for this site. I have been searching for an informed discussion on asbestos roofing mainly because of my interest in collecting rain water from the church roof in one of the villages in southern Laos. There is chronic lack of water in the village – both potable and for daily household use and garden use. I gather that a project can go on to collect rainwater for daily household use, garden use, but not for drinking?

The article seems to equate the middle class with democracy which, by now, appears as an outdated model of modernization. Movements in Northern/Northeastern Thailand since May 2010 (and its links to pro-democracy affiliates in Bangkok that trump previous class divisions) illustrate a democratization at new dimensions. The top-down democratic fatalism projected upon Southeast Asian countries using these standardized models of so-called “illiberalism” not only fails to register where exactly democracy happens, but also ignores the undemocratic nature of liberalization.

Yeah…. A Buddhist Model Village called San-Pya Village in North Maungdaw was the one of the very first Buddhist villages attacked and burnt down by the Bengali Muslims (the so-called Rohingyas) on June 8th.

The Buddhist villagers are now demanding to form armed-people-militia units in their model villages like similar Model Villages in the Kachin State.

At last.

I have just spent a week trying to convince a MA Chula graduate that to present 62 slides – jammed packed with bullets points and meaningless dross – in 1 hour to an international audience in English would simply be impossible – alas, to no avail. Her staff had previously spent two weeks putting this together.

Finally, I told her that she would end up embarrassing herself and would probably lose face.

So, on Friday afternoon, she told her staff to go back to the drawing board and redo the presentation to about 10 slides. All three of them, yes three, are working over the weekend to do this. She is not.

Good grief.

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. 🙂

“This system has undoubtedly been effective in increasing forestland, thereby decreasing greenhouse gases.”

The two statements are not mutually supportive. Increasing forest land does not necessarily reduce so-called “greenhouse gases” and any such claims can only be produced on a computer, no accurate measurements can be made to validate the claim. In any event, it is apparent that the globe has been in a cooling cycle for some time, thus the role of CO2 in controlling the temperature of the planet is vastly overstated, relying on the use of complex feedbacks in computer models to push the claims.

“a thermometer is used to measure the temperature of soil in degraded land and soil in forest land.” To describe farmed land as “degraded” shows just how detached from reality we have become. The land is enhanced by crop production and it means that poor people get to eat.

It is not surprising that there would be a difference in temperature of soil exposed to the sun and that which is protected from the sun by forest. To claim that the difference represents “global warming” is quite bizzarre.

Emeritus Professor of Bio-geography, Philip Stott, said in 2003,

“At the end of the last ice age, only some 12-18000 years ago, the tropics were covered by seasonal savannah grasslands, cooler and much drier than now. There were no rain forests in the Malay Peninsula and much of Amazonia, and, despite the increasing human development of forested space, there are still more rain forests persisting than existed then. Search for “Jungles of the Mind” and “ecohype.”

“In 2005, a single, huge, violent storm that swept across the whole Amazon forest killed half a billion trees”. (AGU, July 2010). The world has not got warmer since then.

One needs to ask the question, who is profiting from the re-forestation, no doubt someone will be reaping carbon credits from this activity, which are not available to the poor farmers who are seeking to feed themselves and their families. Perhaps if they were growing bio-fuels, so that food can be burned for fuel in the West and make people feel good, they would not be so persecuted.

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!