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%!
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.
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?
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.
I agree with you absolutely. With advances in technology and drops in prices, it has become very difficult to make a living of a farm unless it’s run on a large scale. A farmer in the West spends about 5-6 hours per hectare per year. Farming 200 hectares of land is not a job, it’s a hobby. And for most agricultural products prices are too low to sell it profitably.
Jared Diamond is giving a very insightful description of local communities in Montana in his book Collapse. Basically he is describing the situation in very similar terms to you. Local people have great difficulties to make a living, and their children are moving to other states. “Rich people” are moving in from the coasts driving up land prices, making it even more difficult to live of farming. They are staying less than the 6 months a year exempting them from income tax. I can highly recommend it. http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Succeed-Revised-Edition/dp/0143117009
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.
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?
According to some mid-ranking Nasaka peronnel, five years’ back, “ethnic balance ” was being restored in northern Rakhine through a programme of model-villages. As I understood the programme, Buddhist populations (not always Burman) were being resettled from central Myanmar, Chin state .. and Bangladesh! I gathered that many of the model-villagers were retired civil servants without land and “reformed” convicts. In 2009 I heard that some Delta households had also been offered this resettlement opportunity.
Their report was backed up by an earlier SPDC statement (2001) that security would depend on the establishment of such “Muslim-free” zones. The initial phase targeted around 100 model-villages, each for 100+ families.
Such villages would surely be a flash-point in the current violence, but I have seen no mention of the re-settlement programme in any of the many commentaries. Anyone know more?
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:
The origins of Thailand’s current political tension lie in the dilemmas of this transformed fiscal relationship [with the state]. State investment, combined with wide-ranging support for the tenure of small-holders, has enhanced agricultural incomes and has created numerous sources of non-farm employment in the construction sector, local development projects and government agencies. However, the overall impact of this state support for rural Thailand has been to help develop and maintain a middle-income peasantry rather than fundamentally transform it. The government’s performance on agricultural productivity has been lacklustre by the standards of many of its regional neighbors and, more importantly, it has had limited success in developing non-farm rural enterprise. As a result, the government’s massive investment in the rural economy has helped to maintain a large rural population that, despite significant livelihood improvements, is insufficiently productive to fully meet the aspirations that economic growth has aroused. There is a strong political expectation that the state will improve its efforts to enhance rural livelihoods, reduce inequality and provide a secure backup when experimental engagements with private capital fail. Rural political society in Thailand is not driven by a peasantry that is staging a rearguard action against dissolution, but by a peasantry that is assertively negotiating the terms of its persistence. The central element in the political strategy of this middle-income peasantry is to weave the power and resources of the state into the economic and social fabric of village life. As we have seen in Ban Tiam, this strategy is part of a broader orientation to power–also evident in dealings with capricious spirits and unpredictable corporations–that seeks to domesticate power in the pursuit of safety, security and prosperity.
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?
“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?
I guess Asia is a great place for expatriates and the upper middle class (those who have social mobility) but not for the millions who eke out a miserable living, and who face the daily grind of corrupt businesses, and even more corrupt governments.
As for the West, I’m sure the citizens of the West, with their long history in fighting for the rights of the individual (beginning with the overthrowing of monarchs, to fascists leaders) will know how to deal with the JP Morgans, Goldman Sachs, etc..that you mentioned.
I don’t know about an Internet link, but if you can wait a little while I’ll try to find the cuttings of the newspapers I saved from 2003. I am in Europe now, but when I get back to the States in late July I will dig them up and send scans to you. Send me your email address at [email protected], and I’ll forward it to you.
Fortunately we don’t see the rampant corruption in Asia with politicians in bed with business in the West…well assuming you choose to ignore minor exceptions such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Big Oil, Solar, GE, GM, Fannie Mae, MP Capital, AIG, Arms Manufactures, Halliburton etc, etc. And certainly in many western countries since the supposed war on terror things have just gotten so much more liberal.
I don’t deny the truth of the article, however living in Asia is these days has much more freedom than in the increasingly fascist West.
September 15, 2005 is the date the Channel 9 dropped Sondhi Limthongkul’s Muangthai Rai Sapda” (Thailand Weekly) show saying it improperly cited His Majesty the King and the monarchy on several occasions in the previous month.
It is after this date that Sondhi started his public forums at Thammasat University and later at Lumpini Park which marked the beginning of the organized campaign against Thaksin.
Chris L our debate appears to be one of realism or more pragmatic approaches as opposed to more idealistic approaches. I am unashamedly in the latter category (‘you may say I am a dreamer but I am not the only one’, JL), but I need a shot of pragmatism from time to time, so your points are worth considering. I don’t think we can find middle ground easily, esp. not on an email list! But anyway, for decades there has been a drift to rural, non-high consuming areas by idealists and people who just cannot hack it anymore in the big cities of western countries. There is I believe a drift away from the economic model, the neo-liberals, and the corporate greed of recent years by ‘thinking’ people. In Thailand these drifts can be detected too – ‘hippies’, organic growing movements, overcrowded national parks, idyllic resorts (pandering to the rich but at least breathing easy). There are people who do not want to leave the land in Thailand for family and other reasons, but leaving the land covers a mixture of aspirations, and economics cannot be separated from many of these desires to move. I think we should be talking about aspirations and inequalities and not just how things have improved over time and how much better it will be when we are all in cities.
When my 8 year old ‘adopted’ Issarn daughter was staying with us during school holidays she woke up one morning and in all innocence asked “why do you live where it’s like hell when you could be in heaven in the village?” BTW WHO have just announced that their research says diesel is in the same category of cancer causing properties as asbestos.
The arguments put forward by Clive Kessler and Gerhard Hoffstaedter provides the reasons that the Malaysia solution, in an imperfect world, is the best way to cast attention to and resolve, at least in the short term, the problems faced by those suffering the most – the refugees.
And reading their arguments, I would agree with them that the Malaysia Solution is probably the best way forward.
Mark MacKinnon, East Asia correspondent for Canada’s The Globe and Mail has come up with new terminologies for autocrats based on their characteristics. Four Southeast Asian countries and two leaders made it to this list of autocrats in the world.
Najib Razak is a “false democrat” along with Cambodia’s Hun Sen while Vietnam’s Communist Party and the past Myanmar’s military junta were in the “callous capitalists” category.
Mark classifies the false democrat as follows:
-Key characteristics: They hold elections but have no intention of giving up power. Serious political rivals are jailed and their parties are outlawed on legal technicalities. Mr. Putin’s spin doctors call it “managed democracy” – giving voters the appearance of choice while ensuring they have very little to choose from on election day.
-Reason for hope: Because they allow the trappings of democracy – opposition parties, some independent media, the very process of going through an election every few years – these false democracies create the possibility of change. Mr. Milosevic and Mr. Mubarak were ousted because citizens used the political space allowed them in a false democracy. Russia’s opposition has similarly been on the advance over the past seven months. The next election in Malaysia promises to be interesting.
-Reason for despair: False democracies give the impression of being freer than they really are, which means they rarely face the kind of international pressure that the really nasty regimes get.
Hi Greg, just briefly, I think the “Malaysian Solution” has more to do with policy compromise than Malaysia and Australia’s commitments towards human rights. The question as to why the big theme has to be one of “compromise” could turn up some very interesting observations about Australian identity today.
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Peasants and the state
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%!
Peasants and the state
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.
Peasants and the state
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.
Leaving the farm
Allan,
I agree with you absolutely. With advances in technology and drops in prices, it has become very difficult to make a living of a farm unless it’s run on a large scale. A farmer in the West spends about 5-6 hours per hectare per year. Farming 200 hectares of land is not a job, it’s a hobby. And for most agricultural products prices are too low to sell it profitably.
Jared Diamond is giving a very insightful description of local communities in Montana in his book Collapse. Basically he is describing the situation in very similar terms to you. Local people have great difficulties to make a living, and their children are moving to other states. “Rich people” are moving in from the coasts driving up land prices, making it even more difficult to live of farming. They are staying less than the 6 months a year exempting them from income tax. I can highly recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Succeed-Revised-Edition/dp/0143117009
Peasants and the state
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.
Peasants and the state
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?
Intolerance, Islam and the Internet in Burma
Can someone advise here?
According to some mid-ranking Nasaka peronnel, five years’ back, “ethnic balance ” was being restored in northern Rakhine through a programme of model-villages. As I understood the programme, Buddhist populations (not always Burman) were being resettled from central Myanmar, Chin state .. and Bangladesh! I gathered that many of the model-villagers were retired civil servants without land and “reformed” convicts. In 2009 I heard that some Delta households had also been offered this resettlement opportunity.
Their report was backed up by an earlier SPDC statement (2001) that security would depend on the establishment of such “Muslim-free” zones. The initial phase targeted around 100 model-villages, each for 100+ families.
Such villages would surely be a flash-point in the current violence, but I have seen no mention of the re-settlement programme in any of the many commentaries. Anyone know more?
Peasants and the state
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:
Peasants and the state
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?
Peasants and the state
“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?
Peasants and the state
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.
University rankings from Chula’s perspective
See today’s article in Times Higher Education:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420399&c=1
Southeast Asia’s illiberal regimes
Freedom in Asia Mr. Damage,
It depends.
I guess Asia is a great place for expatriates and the upper middle class (those who have social mobility) but not for the millions who eke out a miserable living, and who face the daily grind of corrupt businesses, and even more corrupt governments.
As for the West, I’m sure the citizens of the West, with their long history in fighting for the rights of the individual (beginning with the overthrowing of monarchs, to fascists leaders) will know how to deal with the JP Morgans, Goldman Sachs, etc..that you mentioned.
Review of Saying the Unsayable
Alessio,
I don’t know about an Internet link, but if you can wait a little while I’ll try to find the cuttings of the newspapers I saved from 2003. I am in Europe now, but when I get back to the States in late July I will dig them up and send scans to you. Send me your email address at [email protected], and I’ll forward it to you.
Rick
Southeast Asia’s illiberal regimes
Fortunately we don’t see the rampant corruption in Asia with politicians in bed with business in the West…well assuming you choose to ignore minor exceptions such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Big Oil, Solar, GE, GM, Fannie Mae, MP Capital, AIG, Arms Manufactures, Halliburton etc, etc. And certainly in many western countries since the supposed war on terror things have just gotten so much more liberal.
I don’t deny the truth of the article, however living in Asia is these days has much more freedom than in the increasingly fascist West.
Thailand’s reconciliation proposals
September 15, 2005 is the date the Channel 9 dropped Sondhi Limthongkul’s Muangthai Rai Sapda” (Thailand Weekly) show saying it improperly cited His Majesty the King and the monarchy on several occasions in the previous month.
It is after this date that Sondhi started his public forums at Thammasat University and later at Lumpini Park which marked the beginning of the organized campaign against Thaksin.
Leaving the farm
Chris L our debate appears to be one of realism or more pragmatic approaches as opposed to more idealistic approaches. I am unashamedly in the latter category (‘you may say I am a dreamer but I am not the only one’, JL), but I need a shot of pragmatism from time to time, so your points are worth considering. I don’t think we can find middle ground easily, esp. not on an email list! But anyway, for decades there has been a drift to rural, non-high consuming areas by idealists and people who just cannot hack it anymore in the big cities of western countries. There is I believe a drift away from the economic model, the neo-liberals, and the corporate greed of recent years by ‘thinking’ people. In Thailand these drifts can be detected too – ‘hippies’, organic growing movements, overcrowded national parks, idyllic resorts (pandering to the rich but at least breathing easy). There are people who do not want to leave the land in Thailand for family and other reasons, but leaving the land covers a mixture of aspirations, and economics cannot be separated from many of these desires to move. I think we should be talking about aspirations and inequalities and not just how things have improved over time and how much better it will be when we are all in cities.
When my 8 year old ‘adopted’ Issarn daughter was staying with us during school holidays she woke up one morning and in all innocence asked “why do you live where it’s like hell when you could be in heaven in the village?” BTW WHO have just announced that their research says diesel is in the same category of cancer causing properties as asbestos.
Australians, cattles, refugees and Four Corners
Hi Dahlia,
Yes, I agree its a political comprise.
The arguments put forward by Clive Kessler and Gerhard Hoffstaedter provides the reasons that the Malaysia solution, in an imperfect world, is the best way to cast attention to and resolve, at least in the short term, the problems faced by those suffering the most – the refugees.
And reading their arguments, I would agree with them that the Malaysia Solution is probably the best way forward.
Southeast Asia’s illiberal regimes
Thanks Colum for being a brave fish.
Mark MacKinnon, East Asia correspondent for Canada’s The Globe and Mail has come up with new terminologies for autocrats based on their characteristics. Four Southeast Asian countries and two leaders made it to this list of autocrats in the world.
Najib Razak is a “false democrat” along with Cambodia’s Hun Sen while Vietnam’s Communist Party and the past Myanmar’s military junta were in the “callous capitalists” category.
Australians, cattles, refugees and Four Corners
Hi Greg, just briefly, I think the “Malaysian Solution” has more to do with policy compromise than Malaysia and Australia’s commitments towards human rights. The question as to why the big theme has to be one of “compromise” could turn up some very interesting observations about Australian identity today.