Thai Agriculture

The history, science, and social aspects of today’s Thai agriculture is traced from hunters and gatherers through agro-cities through State-religious Empires and immigrating Tai to produce a sustainable agriculture. The wet glutinous rice culture determined administrative structures in a pragmatic society which regularly produced a saleable surplus. Continuing today, these systems consolidated the importance of rice agriculture to national security and economic well-being, as Chinese and European influence benefited agribusiness and initiated the demand which would expand agriculture through population increase until accessible land was expended. As agriculture declined in relative financial importance, it continued to provide the benefits of employment, crisis resilience, self-sufficiency, rural social support, and cultural custody. Agricultural institutions evolved from a taxation and dispute resolution base to provide research, education, and technology transfer at levels below potential as they supported commercial agriculture funded by credit. Agribusiness expanded from the 1960s and small-holders were partly viewed as a past relic which agribusiness could modernise. Unique elements of Thai agriculture include: irrigation technologies; administrative structures based on water control; global leadership in many agricultural commodities; multinational agribusiness; negotiating approaches; potential for further increases from known technologies, and an open culture which has embraced new ideas. One of the world’s few major agricultural exporters, Thailand leads the world in rice, rubber, canned pineapple, and black tiger prawn production and export, the region in chicken meat export and several other commodities, and feeds more the four times its own population from less intensive agriculture than its neighbours. Poised to benefit from expansion in livestock demand, poverty reduction, and improved education, research, and legal and social systems, evident in the recent Asian financial crisis, will be considered with popular concern for socially sensitive alternatives for small-holder farmers to co-exist with commercial agriculture. Thailand will likely remain one of the world’s major agricultural countries in social, environmental and economic terms for the foreseeable future, as it addresses the continuing rural issues of poverty and inequity.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

Problems of measurement; Growth of the rural sector; Analysis of crops: rice, rubber and kenaf; Analysis of crops: other crops.

Farmers in the Forest, while using examples chiefly from northern Thailand, is concerned with complex problems found in all tropical countries. In these areas rapid population growth, increasing demands for food, and burgeoning international markets for forest products and other raw materials are associated with active competition for land and natural resources in upland areas. This book brings together studies by administrators, agronomists, anthropologists, forest ecologists, geographers and jurists, who describe a variety of swidden systems and their effect on soil, forest, society, and economy. They point to conflicts between traditional farming systems and modern legal and administrative constraints now being imposed, and they describe special and technological conditions that contribute to a marginal, stagnant upland economy, increasing socio-economic disparities with the lowlands, and the serious ecological consequences of these conditions. Several possible solutions are suggested to solve these problems.

The economic history of Thailand between 1880 and 1975 contrasts sharply with the development experiences of other Third World countries. Between the opening of trade in 1850 and 1941, when war halted economic activity, Thailand became a major exporter of rice in the world market. Although conditions for further growth seemed highly favourable, Thailand's rapid integration into the world economy failed to improve living standards, and rice yields actually declined. In examining the causes of the underdevelopment of Thai agriculture over the last 100 years, Feeny introduces supply and demand models of technical and institutional change to analyse why the rice export boom did not result in more development. This book, much of which is based on primary research in the Thai National Archives, is one of the few quantitative economic histories of a less developed country.

The mainstream agri-food system in Thailand has been shaped to aid capital accumulation by domestic and transnational hegemonic forces, and is currently sustained through hegemonic agri-food production-distribution, governance structures and ideational order. However, sustainable agriculture and land reform movements have to certain extents managed to offer alternatives. This book adopts a neo-Marxist and Gramscian approach to studying the political economy of the agricultural and food system in Thailand (1990-2014). The author argues that hegemonic forces have many measures to co-opt dissent into hegemonic structures, and that counter-hegemony should be seen as an ongoing process over a long period of time where predominantly counter-hegemonic forces, constrained by political economic structural conditions, may at times retain some hegemonic elements. Contrary to what some academic studies suggest, the author argues that localist-inspired social movements in Thailand are not insular and anti-globalisation. Instead, they are selective in fostering collaborations and globalisation based on values such as sustainability, fairness and partnership. Providing new perspectives on polarised politics in Thailand, particularly how cross-class alliances can further or frustrate counter-hegemonic movements, the book points to the importance of analysing social movements in relation to established political authority. It will be of interest to academics in the field of Politics and International Relations, Sociology, Development Studies and Asian Studies.