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.
Read more about this topic: Rice Production In Thailand
Famous quotes containing the words effects and/or farmers:
“The best road to correct reasoning is by physical science; the way to trace effects to causes is through physical science; the only corrective, therefore, of superstition is physical science.”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“This fair homestead has fallen to us, and how little have we done to improve it, how little have we cleared and hedged and ditched! We are too inclined to go hence to a “better land,” without lifting a finger, as our farmers are moving to the Ohio soil; but would it not be more heroic and faithful to till and redeem this New England soil of the world?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)