Rice Production in Thailand - Effects On Low-income Farmers

Effects On Low-income Farmers

While all of these advances helped improve overall production of rice in Thailand, many low-income farmers in Thailand were left worse off. Many peasants were unable to hold onto to their land that they used to harvest rice on and had to become tenants to survive. The government would always expect tax revenue, even during a bad year, and this pushed many low-income farmers even closer to the margin. New technologies also pushed up the entrance cost of rice farming and made it harder for farmers to own their land and produce rice. Farmers that already had somewhat large scale operations or could afford all the new chemicals, rice strains, and tractors benefited greatly while the normal peasant was turned from a land owning rice producer to a manual laborer on others land. To examine the efficiency of rice fields the graph shown in Figure 4 displays the increased productivity of the land. The yield of paddy rice in Thailand is clearly rising since 1961 in the graph. The yield is measured by dividing tons of rice produced by hectares of rice land.